Gabriella Kiss

Improved Essays
The author of this article, Gabriella Kiss, analyzes key aspects within intercultural communication. She brings up a lot of thoughtful points within the article. She begins by explaining how the key factor of understanding intercultural communication is the concept of a stranger. Since every culture has different norms, rules, and expectations, emphasis must be placed on understanding and accepting the other person’s culture. Communication with any person involves predicting or anticipating their responses. However, if the communication is with someone from another culture that you may not be familiar with, this could be difficult to do. By having a better understanding of their culture, you can begin to predict and anticipate responses much …show more content…
While the cultural level includes information about another’s culture, the sociocultural level includes analyzing the groups to which the other belongs. The psychocultural level is more about that person’s personal characteristics. In addition, she also summarized the three points of personal and social communication. The first, personal communication, can be used to refer to how an individual can communicate within the host’s environment using verbal and nonverbal messages. Nonverbal communication can be vitally important because people often tend to look for nonverbal cues when the verbal messages are vague or confusing. Nonverbal cues can include touching, physical appearance, or facial expressions. In other cultures like Japan, understanding nonverbal components of communication is very important. This just shows the difference in cultures between Japan and America. While American’s tend to focus more on verbal communication, Japan’s culture focuses more on receiving the intended meaning of the conversation through nonverbal commutation. The second point is host communication, which is how well the individual understands the host’s language rules and norms, with the final point being social communication, the actual interaction between the two

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    The movie I decided to analyze for this assignment is Blood In Blood Out. This movie is about two Latino brothers, Cruz and Paco, and their cousin, Miclo, who is half white and half Latino, and how their lives are affected by the pact they have to always stick together and fight for each other. Later on in the movie the guys are separated after many conflicts they encountered between each other and with others. Cruz turns to drugs, Paco becomes a detective, and Miclo goes to prison. There are many different forms of communication and relationships between the characters, and there is also a great amount of conflict, which is why I chose this movie.…

    • 1752 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Understand hierarchies. When communicating with a different culture, there may be unwritten rules about social hierarchy that you are not used to.[4][5] For instance, you may come from a culture where men and women are expected to communicate equally with each other, but may have to interact with someone from a culture where men may do more talking in mixed company. Similarly, you may be communicating with someone who expects that a younger person should let an older person do most of the talking, while you expect people across age groups to communicate equally. Be respectful and tolerant.…

    • 263 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Additionally, the culture of a people or establishment may highly influence the non verbal communication that occurs between members of that culture. In addition, particular cultures may…

    • 1183 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this intercultural communication model, Stewart, Danielian and Foster (1969) developed a new way to improve communication by introducing cultural self-awareness as a key. To do a better analysis, they believe that culture might be studied by using four factors which are: concrete behavior, values, assumptions and generalized cultural forms, however, they focus on the last three factors. By values, the authors say that they can be concrete, discrete, specific and they can be comparable to personal awareness which means an individual can use their values to explain their feelings and behavior. On the other hand, assumptions can be abstract and can give sense of reality to an individual. Although, values and assumptions can be blended, sometimes…

    • 801 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    When a person from one culture sends a message to a person from a different culture, this process is known as intercultural communication (McDaniel, Samnovar & Porter, 2012). We interact with people from different cultures on a daily basis and therefore it is useful to have knowledge of the theories which develop our intercultural communication skills. Several of these concepts can be explained through stories relayed to me by my friend Victoria, who has experience working with Middle Eastern people after joining the Muslim community in 2014. More people should be made aware of theories such as Hofstede’s (2012) cultural dimensions, and Ting-Toomey 's (1999) staircase model in order to avoid cultural misunderstanding. Applying these concepts to understand Victoria’s experiences have also helped enlighten me about my own ethnic identity and cultural values.…

    • 1673 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Interpersonal communication is the process of sending and receiving information between two or more people. It is a person-to-person contact, it includes everyday exchange that may be formal or informal and can take place anywhere by means of words, sounds, facial expression, gestures and postures. Two significant learning points for me during this course was in module 3, using the I-language instead of you-language which gives power over our thoughts, feelings and emotions to others. To take responsibility for your own feelings, rely on I language rather than you language. I language owns thoughts and feelings and does not blame them on others (Wood 125).…

    • 1010 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Communication “Communication embraces the entire world of human interaction and behavior” (Giger & Davidhizar, 2002, p. 185). Communication is how culture is preserved and transmitted (Giger & Davidhizar, 2002). There are two types of communication in one’s culture, these include verbal and nonverbal. Some examples of nonverbal communication are, facial expressions, body language, hugging, shaking hands and other forms of touching. Communication can be the biggest barrier in working with patients from diverse cultural backgrounds (Giger & Davidhizar, 2002).…

    • 827 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In his book, Floyd emphasizes nonverbal communication as the “behaviors and characteristics that convey meaning without the use of words” (179). Before this lesson, I didn’t notice that regular people use nonverbal communication as much as nonverbal people. Nonverbal communication provides a better connection between two individual. Unlike normal communication, nonverbal communication requires us to observe the partner’s facial expression and body language than just words. Therefore, we understand our partner feeling and emotion better.…

    • 1133 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The downfall for many organizations is the incompetence to be able to understand the differences between cultures and wanting to promote a cross-cultural program. To promote interaction between different cultures has its advantages but takes a great amount of time and research (Barker). Not having a cross-cultural understanding will inhibit companies from being able to compete with their competition due to being unaware of other cultural differences around the world. Cross-cultural communication is no longer an option to choose to participate in companies to communicate with other individuals it is now a requirement for companies to create a program to diversify its employees to stay above the competition (Zofi).…

    • 1914 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Here is the report you requested about the culture’s impact on communication. Undoubtedly, there is a huge impact of cultural differences on the communication process and in this regard, it is important for the people to know about the cultural behavior of the members of the society. The information about the low and high context cultures provides important details about the type of people and their cultural practices, which makes it easier for others to interact with them. The cultural differences are sometimes considered as a huge barrier to effective communication because of the differences in the cultural practices and linguistic differences. In this respect, it is wise to become knowledgeable about different cultures, and for…

    • 754 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Crisis Communication Essay

    • 1171 Words
    • 5 Pages

    5. Cultural implications for the crisis communication Though General Motors company has the similar crisis situation with Toyota company, which is caused by faulty vehicles, resulting in criticism of the general public and negative influences on companies, results turn out differently. The Toyota company suffered more damages than the General Motors company on sales, reputation, brand image, customers’ trust and loyalty. Tracing reasons lay behind, cultural factors play an important role in differentiating approaches and attitudes. 5.1 Hall’s high-context and low-context cultures…

    • 1171 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many people think of cultures and habits of their own country when they hear the words “Cross Cultural”. Communication can be one of the example for it. According to Wikipedia, Cross cultural communication is a field of study which looks at how people communicates who has different cultural backgrounds. Sure, this affects those people to have troubles for communicating with other people, and for that, there is a way to solve this problem called the “6 stumbling blocks”. First is the language difference.…

    • 704 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    It is important to be an effective intercultural communicator to some degree. An effective intercultural communicator is able to share information across different cultures and different groups. They have to communicate in a way that is appropriate and effective to different cultures (Johnson, Lenartowicz, & Apud, 2006, p. 529). The United States is becoming more and more culturally diverse by the day. Most people would think that politicians are great at intercultural communication because of their line of work.…

    • 858 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    There is also the misconception that nonverbal cues are universal. The reason why people do this, is that when evaluating someone, they use their own culture as the frame of reference, and it is easier to assume similarity than to contemplate differences. The next stumbling block in intercultural communication is language. Even if two individuals of different cultures speak the same language, the differences in vocabulary, syntax, idioms, slang, and accents are enough cause for major miscommunication.…

    • 1441 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Filda Salim 5 Thesis Essay Intercultural misunderstanding is a problem that foreigners always have difficulty with whenever they come to a new country. The process of which individuals and groups communicate from different background is called intercultural communication. I realized the process of responding to people from different cultures can be really challenging.…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays