COPING WITH THE CHALLENGES OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

• Intercultural communication


  Communication between people from two different cultures
• Challenges of intercultural communication

  • Speech perturbations
  • Poorly managed turn-taking
  • Non-aligned parallel talk
• Speech perturbations


  Alterations or disruptions in the normal flow pattern of speech
• Poorly managed turn-taking


  Situations where the flow of conversation is disorganized or inefficient
• Non-aligned parallel talk


  Communication pattern where two or more participants engage in simultaneous but not coordinated conversations
• To address the challenges of intercultural communication, we have to learn or understand the other cultures before engaging in a conversation with people from other cultures
• Handshake


  A globally widespread, brief greeting or parting tradition in which two people grasp one of each other's hands and in most cases accompanied by a brief up-and-down movement of the grasped hands
• Handshake customs by country/region

  • United States: Firm handshake
  • France: Soft handshake
  • Germany: Firm handshake, for men, traditionally accompanied by a slight bow
  • Japan: Handshake with arm firmly extended, accompanied by a bow
  • Middle East: Handshake and free hand placed on the forearm of the other person
• Greeting rituals also vary from culture to culture, e.g. Japanese women bow differently from Japanese men, and the German bow (diener) is a bow to and in recognition of an authority
• Sources of misunderstanding in intercultural communication

  • Ambiguity-lack of explicitness on the part of the speaker
  • Performance-related misunderstanding-slips of the tongue and mishearing
  • Language-related misunderstanding-ungrammaticality of the sentences
  • Gaps in the world knowledge-gaps in content rather than language
  • Local context-turns and the turns within sequences produced by the participants themselves, and the orientation of the participants as well as the repair moves that follow the displayed understanding
• Local context as sources of misunderstanding

  How the specific circumstances, environment, or cultural norms within a particular community or region can lead to misunderstandings between individuals or groups
• Gaps in world knowledge as sources of misunderstanding


  Situations where misunderstandings arise due to differences in knowledge or understanding about global issues, events, cultures, or phenomena
• Three approaches to intercultural communication

  • Social Science Approach
  • Interpretive Approach
  • Critical Approach
• Social Science Approach


  Based on the assumptions that human behavior is predictable and that there is a describable external reality, rooted in sociology and psychology, aims to predict how culture influences communication, often uses quantitative methods
• Interpretive Approach


  Interested in describing human behaviors which they believe to be unpredictable and creative, believe that culture is both created and perpetuated through communication, uses methods like field studies, ethnographies, observations, and participant observations, studies culture from the perspective of the members
• Critical Approach


  Views reality as subjective and emphasizes the importance of studying the context in which communication occurs, views culture in terms of power struggles, aims to identify and make explicit power differences in order to liberate those individuals who lack power in society, interested in effecting change in society