Nowadays, foreign language teaching is not only to cultivate learners' language ability, but also to help them gain the ability of cross-cultural communication. Just under such a background, Galal Walker (Wu Weike), a professor at Ohio State University in the United States, has come up with the performed-culture approach based on the similarities between communicative behaviour and stage performance. This approach not only explains the reasons of misunderstanding of intercultural communication in a better way, but also points out the new development direction for the current foreign language teaching, especially the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.

This book has the following features:

a. With a large number of vivid and typical misunderstandings of Sino-American intercultural communication, this book analyzes the reasons of misunderstanding and reveals the influence of culture on communicative behaviours from the angle of "cultural story".

b. This book introduces a teaching method which can effectively cultivate foreign language learners' intercultural communicative competence. This method puts culture in the core position of teaching, takes culture-performance as the main form of learning, breaks the traditional language teaching mode, and makes the goal of cultivating learners' intercultural communicative competence more feasible.

c. This book provides the teaching cases of primary, intermediate and advanced Chinese classes, which are very helpful for readers to have a better understanding of the teaching contents and methods of the performed-culture approach.