Chinese Tour Guides’ Strategies in Intercultural Communication—Implications for Language Teaching and Tourism Education

This paper presents Chinese tour guides’ strategies in intercultural communication. It is based on a research carried out in Yunnan Province of China to explore intercultural communication of professional English-speaking tour guides with their tourists from various cultural backgrounds. Findings indicates that faced with the prospect of conflict with tourists, or between tourists, guides will adopt varied strategies according to which roles, identities and relationships they choose to identify as most appropriate in the particular situation. Role, identity and relationship are important; context is important, and individual perceptions of appropriateness are also strong influences on the guides’ responses. What influences tour guides’ choice of strategies and leads to their perceptions is a complicated issue. It has to be understood and explained with due consideration of personal, cultural and contextual perspectives