Intercultural communication is communication between people with differing cultural identities. One reason we should study intercultural communication is to foster greater self-awareness (Martin & Nakayama, 2010).
For teaching professionals working in multicultural schools, learning about Intercultural Communication is essential as it otherwise can lead to discrimination, bias and alienation of children from different backgrounds. Some cultures teach their kids to be quiet and respect authority, others to be expressive and challenge ideas.
· There are actually some degrees where you can study either just intercultural communication itself or which incorporate it into its syllabus. It is vital in international relations and most international business and negotiation studies and you can actually work as an intercultural advisor.
It is important for people to study intercultural communication for us to be aware and be more receptive to various cultures and traditions. Cultural diversity helps us understand different perspectives within the world that we live in, to respect and recognize other “ways of being”. fREFERENCES: Ahluwalia, R. (2020, June 19).
The act of teaching and learning is a form of intercultural communication. Teachers and students bridge generational, cultural, and linguistic differences daily in the classroom, and educators' reflection on this ongoing interaction leads to learning for both teachers and students.
Intercultural teaching competence enables instructors to bridge cultural, linguistic or other differences in the classroom, communicate successfully across disciplinary cultures (Dimitrov, 2012), and to establish meaningful relationships with and among students in order to facilitate learning and promote student ...
what are four reasons for studying intercultural communication? increased opportunities for intercultural contact, enhanced business effectiveness, improved intergroup relations, enhances self awareness.
The three most critical elements of intercultural communication competence are knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
Intercultural communication competence (ICC) is the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in various cultural contexts. There are numerous components of ICC. Some key components include motivation, self- and other knowledge, and tolerance for uncertainty.
Intercultural understanding stimulates students' interest in the lives of others. It cultivates values and dispositions such as curiosity, care, empathy, reciprocity, respect and responsibility, open-mindedness and critical awareness, and supports new and positive intercultural behaviours.
Intercultural communication also requires an understanding that different cultures have different customs, standards, social mores, and even thought patterns. Finally, good intercultural communication skills requires a willingness to accept differences these and adapt to them.
This makes communication and cross-cultural understanding more crucial for everyone, including executives, business leaders, workplace managers, and employees. In order to develop skills as communicators, we must gain practical knowledge of the factors that make communication across cultures succeed or fail.
To show you, I would like to share with you my most recent experience: I’ve been living in Spain for more than 3 years now, but I have been studying Spanish for almost 9 years.
In order to understand what intercultural communication means, you first have to understand the way that every natural language behaves. Let’s play a little game. Grab a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. Now, draw a tree and a clock. On the clock, mark which hours mean “morning” to you, which are “afternoon” and which are “night”.
First of all, only the fact of realizing that what is 100% true for you might not be the same for someone else makes you open your mind, become a more tolerant person, it forces you to analyze the situation and makes you more empathetic.
There are actually some degrees where you can study either just intercultural communication itself or which incorporate it into its syllabus. It is vital in international relations and most international business and negotiation studies and you can actually work as an intercultural advisor.
For the end, I would like to give you some piece of advice about what worked the best for me. First of all, I find observation one of the best methods of learning. I do it basically all the time when I get out of my house and it taught me a lot about the culture I’m living in.
Intercultural communication offers the ability to deal across cultures, which is increasingly important, as the world gets smaller . Getting smaller doesn't mean the world is becoming identical, it means having more and more contact with people who are culturally different.
Intercultural theories are now widely used in education, health care, and other public services. Such developments have been necessitated due to ever-increasing multicultural groups of the population.
Intercultural or interpersonal communication may be defined as a continuous occurrence for mutual transfer of information resulting from happenings in the past and the past actions of the concerned parties.
To share information and ideas among cultures, it is necessary to know one’s own culture, cultures of other surrounding groups, the dominating group’s culture and co-cultures of gender, religion or age group, etc.
There are 4 types of IC skills as below: 1. Personal character like communication ability is not limited to the recipient, situation, and time. 2. Communication skills suitable to situations independent of the receiver or receivers. Examples: public speaking, group meetings and job interviews. 3.
As we are not alone, we need to move in society. For this, the sharing of information, thoughts, and ideas are necessary. It is called communication, and via communication, we express our views, make others aware of our presence, and participate in every activity.
The sender and receiver of the message are the same people, the message being our thought. Intrapersonal communication is perpetual.
Studying Intercultural Communication is important to help students develop skills and knowledge about cultural awareness and sensitivity to others and to questions of diversity in the workplace. A complex understanding of and a critical approach to interculturality, cultures and identities, and their role in various interpersonal encounters, beyond simplistic approaches based on national differences is important in an ever evolving world.
Cross-cultural communication refers to the communication between people who have differences in one or more of the following: styles of working, age, nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. In layman’s language, it is how people belonging to different cultures communicate with each other. This type of communication is necessary to avoid misunderstandings that can lead to conflicts between individuals or groups. Cross-cultural communication creates a feeling of trust and enables cooperation.
Cultural awareness plays a major role in the prevention of ethnocentrism.
The best way to prepare you to do business with people from another culture is to study their culture in advance. If you plan to do business repeatedly, learn their language. Even if you transact business in English, you show respect by making an effort to learn the local language.
First, let say, most people think of culture as your country of origin. If so, cross-cultural communication is pretty much like communication between people of different nationalities, and thus, different languages, norms and practices. If you live in a country like the US or Canada, or the UK, yes it is necessary to at least maintain your relationship with your friends, colleagues, neighbors, you name it. To me, however, I live in Vietnam
One reason we should study intercultural communication is to foster greater self-awareness (Martin & Nakayama, 2010). Our thought process regarding culture is often “other focused,” meaning that the culture of the other person or group is what stands out in our perception.
As was noted earlier, difference matters, and studying intercultural communication can help us better negotiate our changing world. Changing economies and technologies intersect with culture in meaningful ways (Martin & Nakayama). As was noted earlier, technology has created for some a global village where vast distances are now much shorter due to new technology that make travel and communication more accessible and convenient (McLuhan, 1967). However, as the following “Getting Plugged In” box indicates, there is also a digital divide, which refers to the unequal access to technology and related skills that exists in much of the world. People in most fields will be more successful if they are prepared to work in a globalized world. Obviously, the global market sets up the need to have intercultural competence for employees who travel between locations of a multinational corporation. Perhaps less obvious may be the need for teachers to work with students who do not speak English as their first language and for police officers, lawyers, managers, and medical personnel to be able to work with people who have various cultural identities.
The dialectics discussed earlier affect our intercultural relationships. The similarities-differences dialectic in particular may present challenges to relationship formation (Martin & Nakayama, 2010). While differences between people’s cultural identities may be obvious, it takes some effort to uncover commonalities that can form the basis of a relationship. Perceived differences in general also create anxiety and uncertainty that is not as present in intracultural relationships. Once some similarities are found, the tension within the dialectic begins to balance out and uncertainty and anxiety lessen. Negative stereotypes may also hinder progress toward relational development, especially if the individuals are not open to adjusting their preexisting beliefs. Intercultural relationships may also take more work to nurture and maintain. The benefit of increased cultural awareness is often achieved, because the relational partners explain their cultures to each other. This type of explaining requires time, effort, and patience and may be an extra burden that some are not willing to carry. Last, engaging in intercultural relationships can lead to questioning or even backlash from one’s own group. I experienced this type of backlash from my white classmates in middle school who teased me for hanging out with the African American kids on my bus. While these challenges range from mild inconveniences to more serious repercussions, they are important to be aware of. As noted earlier, intercultural relationships can take many forms. The focus of this section is on friendships and romantic relationships, but much of the following discussion can be extended to other relationship types.
List and summarize the six dialectics of intercultural communication.
The personal-contextual dialectic highlights the connection between our personal patterns of and preferences for communicating and how various contexts influence the personal. In some cases, our communication patterns and preferences will stay the same across many contexts. In other cases, a context shift may lead us to alter our communication and adapt. For example, an American businesswoman may prefer to communicate with her employees in an informal and laid-back manner. When she is promoted to manage a department in her company’s office in Malaysia, she may again prefer to communicate with her new Malaysian employees the same way she did with those in the United States. In the United States, we know that there are some accepted norms that communication in work contexts is more formal than in personal contexts. However, we also know that individual managers often adapt these expectations to suit their own personal tastes. This type of managerial discretion would likely not go over as well in Malaysia where there is a greater emphasis put on power distance (Hofstede, 1991). So while the American manager may not know to adapt to the new context unless she has a high degree of intercultural communication competence, Malaysian managers would realize that this is an instance where the context likely influences communication more than personal preferences.
This dialectic is useful because it helps us account for exceptions to cultural norms. For example, earlier we learned that the United States is said to be a low-context culture, which means that we value verbal communication as our primary, meaning-rich form of communication. Conversely, Japan is said to be a high-context culture, which means they often look for nonverbal clues like tone, silence, or what is not said for meaning. However, you can find people in the United States who intentionally put much meaning into how they say things, perhaps because they are not as comfortable speaking directly what’s on their mind. We often do this in situations where we may hurt someone’s feelings or damage a relationship. Does that mean we come from a high-context culture? Does the Japanese man who speaks more than is socially acceptable come from a low-context culture? The answer to both questions is no. Neither the behaviors of a small percentage of individuals nor occasional situational choices constitute a cultural pattern.
Gaines Jr. S. O., and Kelly A. Brennan, “Establishing and Maintaining Satisfaction in Multicultural Relationships,” in Close Romantic Relationships: Maintenance and Enhancement, eds. John Harvey and Amy Wenzel (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2011), 239.
The attitudes found in the literature regarding cultures, i.e., intercultural dialogues, are significant for reflection on intercultural communication. Many authors, including Avramović (2007) and Fayerstein, consider that culture shapes individual and collective lives in mysterious ways; it offers sense and meaning to life, shaping relations towards nature, man, the world, etc. Sym
Communication and self-reflective skills are nowadays considered to be key competences of intercultural dialogue and integration in contemporary European and broader frames . One of the important questions contemporary pedagogues ask themselves is how they see the possible models of ecient edu-cation for a contemporary society characterised by rapid changes and currents, and for a Europe that is making huge strides towards ever closer integration, thus building specific human intercultural relations. In such an educational concept, nowadays called »a concept of education for action competence«, the ability and readiness of an individual to follow and guide changes, as well as the readiness of an individual to solve problems of personal and social reality,ticipating, among other things, competence for intercultural communication, emphasis is placed on education that will contribute to the development of a capacity for constructive determination towards the development of an ability to develop a suitable and acceptable relation towards differences in an intensi
Hence, multicultural education is more crucial than ever in breaking down stereotypes, intolerance, and bullying within schools; ensuring our new citizens feel welcome and included in their newly adoptive society.
Technology is a useful tool to bridge these groups together and provide cultural-related knowledge. One innovative tool that can achieve this is Diversity Atlas. It is an analytical tool to measure types and extents of cultural traits in an organisation or school community. It is easy and quick for users to input their information, yet the tool provides in-depth and multifaceted analysis. This is especially effective for schools as it has a complex structure that consists of different levels of authority and departments, and breaks down the languages spoken, and cultural groups that otherwise may remain hidden within the school environment. After receiving such analysis, schools are able to gain a better understanding of themselves. They may want to tackle issues such as diversity in certain departments by applying the tool of Diversity Atlas. It is through the school itself to set an example of being proactive in multicultural education, demonstrating to their students the importance of multiculturalism and multicultural education.
Multicultural education allows students to hone their critical thinking skills on topics surrounding cultural and social issues, including “institutional racism, classism, sexism, ableism, ageism and homophobia” ( Gollnick& Chinn, 2006). For instance, multicultural curriculum may include the history of African Americans, and what they had been through from slavery, to the civil rights movement of the 1960 s, to the present with the Black Lives Matter movement and the disproportionate incarceration of young black men. Students can understand the historical continuum of social issues as they are still happening today. Think about the on-going protest on Black Lives Matter, triggered by the death of George Floyd. They may think about the significance of this and why the problem still exists after more than a century since the abolition of slavery was brought into legislation in 1865.
Gay suggests that multicultural curriculum can spark up their interesting in learning when they see content that are familiar to them. He mentioned several studies that indicate ethnically-diverse students had higher academic achievements when cultural-specific elements were incorporated into the curriculum. 2.
Textbook knowledge may be essential in terms of examinations, graduation, and obtaining scholarships, but more importantly, information – regardless of its form – needs to transferred into schematised knowledge systems and applied to life so students can become change-agents, apply knowledge to reality to make a change in society.
School, therefore, is a key place for them to learn about their history and culture. To other students – those who are mostly the majority – learning the music, the festivities, and belief systems of the cultures of their peers and what their backgrounds signify is a powerful tool in creating inclusiveness and promoting intercultural understanding.
The introduction of new cultural groups created a number of issues in the education space. Historically, language barriers were a huge problem in America – as in most Western countries – as public education put heavy emphasis on teaching English and assimilation into the adoptive culture, which negatively impacted new immigrants. ...