跨文化交际问题作业

Get prepared for intercultural communication?

Communication——your ability to share your beliefs, values, ideas, and feelings ——is the basis of all human contact. Whether you live in a city in Canada, a village in India, a commune in Israel, you cannot avoid communication with each other. But how about communication between different cultures? Are you well prepared for that? Before you do that, there are a few points you’d better keep in mind as stated below.

What is intercultural communication

Intercultural communication in its most basic form refers to an academic field of study and research. Its seeks to understand how people from different countries and cultures behave, communicate and perceive the world around them. The findings of such academic research are then applied to 'real life' situations such as how to create cultural synergy between people from different cultures within a business or how psychologists understand their patients. The definition of intercultural communication must also include strands of the field that contribute to it such as anthropology, cultural studies, psychology and communication.

Intercultural communication is not new. As long as people from different cultures have been encountering one another there has been intercultural communication. What is new, however, is the systematic study of exactly what happens when cross-culture contacts and interaction take place—when message producer and message receiver are from different cultures. Increased contact among cultures makes it imperative for people to make a concerted effort to get along with and understand those whose believes and backgrounds may be vastly different from their own. Successful intercultural communication is a matter of highest importance if humankind and society are to survive. Thus, theoretical and practical knowledge about intercultural communication process and ability, through increased awareness and understanding, to coexist peacefully with people who do not necessarily share our own life styles or values, is essential to guarantee successful communication.

Language is a way of marking cultural identity. Language differs, on the other hand, from other phenomena in that it is used to refer to other phenomena and has

usually to be used to refer beyond itself. Language in use by particular speakers is constantly referring beyond itself irrespective at the intentions of the speaker: language cannot be used without carrying meaning and referring beyond itself, even in the most sterile environment of the foreign language class. The meanings of a particular language point to the culture of a particular social group, and the analysis of those meanings—their comprehension by learners and other speakers—involves the analysis and comprehension of that culture. It disregards the nature of language to treat language independently of the culture which it constantly refers to. No doubt all language teaching contains some explicit reference to the culture; the whole from which the particular language is taken. The interdependence of language learning and culture learning is so evident that we can draw the conclusion that language learning is culture learning and consequently that language teaching is culture teaching.

What are elements of human communication

Elements of human communication are the context of the communication, the participants, the messages being communicated, the channels through which the communication occurs, the presence or absence of “noise”, and the verbal and nonverbal responses known as feedback.

As receivers attempt to decode the meaning of messages, they are likely to give some kind of verbal or nonverbal response. Paying attention to both verbal and nonverbal feedback allows us to behave in ways that increase understanding of our messages. Feedback serves useful functions for both senders and receivers: in provides senders with the opportunity to measure how they are coming across, and it provides receivers with the opportunity to exert some influence over the communication process. Verbal communication is, "the ways in which you use the words in a language to generate meaning." It is essentially any communication that uses language, whether it is oral or written. Symbols are used throughout verbal communication as sounds combined to make words-they symbolize ideas, thoughts, etc. Without symbols, communication would be meaningless.