Culture and Communication

            An individual’s communication style and effectiveness are highly influenced by culture.  Culture is usually unconscious to the individual and is difficult to define for most (Vuckovic, 2008).  Culture includes surface characteristics (appearance and food) and deep-rooted characteristics (communication patterns and child-rearing expectations) (O’Hair, Wiemann, Mullin, & Teven, 2015).  A communication barrier can occur when cultural values and expectations are not similar between communicators.  Personally, I have experienced the barrier culture can have on communication when partnering with individuals that are vastly different from myself.  When I became an early childhood educator, I developed an awareness of this barrier as I needed to communicate with diverse populations of families on a university campus.

            I am the first to admit, I was not a competent intercultural communicator at all when I began my career and made several mistakes.  Intercultural communication competence is the capability to adjust your behavior when communicating with others that is considerate of the other’s culture (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 2011).  I had little knowledge, skill, or necessity for the ability to communicate interculturally with others prior to becoming a teacher.  Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I lived in a bi-cultural area (White and African-American) that required only a small amount of flexibility when communicating with others.  As I have mentioned before in my blog posts, in my first official teaching position there were seven different languages represented in one classroom.  As a professional, I needed to adopt some strategies to effectively communicate with the diverse children and families I was working with.

            Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond (2011), recommends three strategies to aid individuals in connecting different cultural perspectives with others when communicating interculturally.  To become competent in intercultural communication you must be knowledgeable, motivated, and skilled (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 2011).  Communicators must actively seek knowledge and use critical listening to appropriately communicate.  Embracing motivation to become a better communicator requires the individual to change their mind set to tolerate ambiguity and avoid negative judgements about others.  The final strategy, skill, encompasses the insight for flexibility and adopting an “other-oriented” focus in communication.  Other-oriented thinking requires two specific skills: social decentering (reflection of others overall perspective) and empathy (appropriate emotional reactions) (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 2011).  Utilizing perspective taking and emotional acknowledgement is an essential strategy to competent communication.

            In the last 15 years, I have utilized these recommended strategies and have become a much more effective intercultural communicator.  I ask questions and listen carefully to develop knowledge to be flexible in my mind frame and behaviors.  The amount of diverse exposure I have experienced recently has motivated me to think differently about culture and how to respect one another’s when partnering in communication.  Personally, I think developing genuine social decentering and empathy during communication has been the most effective skills I have gained.  We are all human and have authentic emotions, I think tapping into that thought process supports all communicators.

Reference

Beebe, S. A., Beebe, S. J., & Redmond, M. V. (2011). Interpersonal communication: Relating to others (6^th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

 

O'Hair, D., Wiemann, M., Mullin, D. I., & Teven, J. (2015). Real communication (3rd. ed). New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. 

Vuckovic, A. (2008). Inter-cultural communication: A foundation of communicative action.  Multicultural Education and Technology Journal, 2(1), 47-59.