Perspective Of Intercultural Communication Research Articles

College English Teaching Viewed from the Perspective of Intercultural Communication

Foreign language teaching and learning is unlikely to be performed effectively without an appropriate understanding of its specific culture and the loss of intercultural awareness will lead to a negative influence on FLT. This article proposes the importance of cultural input in FLT, analyzes the factors of failure in cultivation of students’ capacity of intercultural communication and finally puts forward some methods and strategies to resolve these issues.

Globalization and the Social Integration of South-North Korea - From a Perspective of Inter-cultural Communication -

Globalization and the Social Integration of South-North Korea - From a Perspective of Inter-cultural Communication -

“Critical” Junctures in Intercultural Communication Studies: A Review

This literature review foregrounds the critiques, moves, and junctures that have specifically retheorized culture and communication from a critical intercultural communication perspective, and set the stage for a fifth “moment” in the field of intercultural communication. Likewise, the historically specific moments when various scholars dared to question, confront, and wrestle with definitions and theoretical formations of culture and intercultural communication are delineated. Such a review will elucidate the role a critical perspective has played in the field of intercultural communication, and the crucial research questions, stances, and directions that arise from such a perspective for future intercultural communication studies.

Sources of (Mis)perception and (Mis)understanding in U.S.-China Communication

Using the ethnographic method of participant-observation and casefocused thick description, I have found that in intercultural communication between Chinese and Americans, many misperceptions and misunderstandings occur which neither side is aware of due to differences in communication patterns at the psycho-cultural or deep culture level. However, an educated level of awareness of such differences at the deep culture level could help reduce the chances of formulating and escalating such misperceptions and misunderstandings and in turn enhance the chances to conduct more constructive interactions between the two cultures at all levels and all sectors. The current paper aims to uncover such sources and processes and to propose ways to ease future Sino-American interactions in political, business and social contexts from the perspective of intercultural communication. Intercultural communication is interpersonal in nature. I argue that due to globalization, Sino-American relations is becoming increasingly interpersonal. More and more people from both the countries are meeting and talking more and more frequently and longer and longer for political, business and social purposes. Misperceptions and misunderstandings occurring in their interactions due to differences in deep culture between the two peoples still remain out of the interactants’ mutual and selfawareness and contribute negatively to the relationship between the world’s most advanced country and the world’s largest developing country. Even though so much has been known about each other by each other at the level of high culture, folk culture and other aspects, little is known about each other by each other at the deep culture level. Thus, the perspective of interpersonal/intercultural communication focusing on the

Between the Structural and the Personal: Situated Sense-Makings of “Race”

Using a critical intercultural communication perspective and cultural studies interviewing method, this study traces individuals’ subjective sense-makings of diversity through the trope of “race.” Such sense-makings represent the key (and taken-for-granted) locus of the structural and personal where social actors live out the constructions of diversity and race in deeply felt ways. Our study reveals how individuals articulate and understand race via raceless diversity encodings (whereby race is seemingly stripped of its power inequalities, and all racial/ethnic groups are made equal) and racial pivoting (whereby participants both discursively pull away from and move toward race to suit their individual experiences).

The value of intercultural competence for performance of multicultural teams

Managers working in multinational companies carry out their organizational goals through multicultural teams. Performance of multicultural teams can be examined from an intercultural communication perspective. Executives, managers, management consultants, and educators interested in improving multicultural team performance need to know about intercultural competence and how it affects team performance. This article provides a working definition of high‐performance multicultural teams and outlines the challenges multicultural teams face. These definitions along with extensive interview data and detailed self‐reports of American and Russian managers working in multicultural teams emphasize the high importance of intercultural competence in improving the performance of these teams. This article also serves to highlight the characteristics of high‐performance multicultural teams, the common challenges of multicultural teams, and the sources of these challenges.

Self-shock: The double-binding challenge of identity

Numerous scholars have spoken of the painful effects of identity confusion in sojourner adjustment. We know that it exists, but how does it occur? The question is not about outcomes or differences, but about understanding the dynamics of the contact process itself. How does contact with a different Other produce identity anxiety for the sojourner? Following an intracultural survey of self-identity formation and maintenance, discussion turns to the intercultural dynamics of self-identity processes. The concept of self-shock is introduced. Selfshock rests on the intimate link between Self, Other, and behaviors. Any situation that alters the meanings for behavior has the potential for hampering the individual's ability to maintain consistent, recognizable self-identities. Confusion is no longer with the Other (culture shock), but rather with the Self (self-shock). Selfshock is the intrusion of inconsistent, conflicting self-images. Three dimensions of self-shock are presented: loss of communication competence vis-a-vis the Self, distorted self-reflections in the responses of Others, and the challenge of changing identity-bound behaviors. From the intercultural communication perspective, self-shock is a double-bind based on behavioral ambiguity: Unshared meanings for behaviors increase one's need to confirm self-identities, however, unshared meanings for behaviors decrease one's ability to do so. The analysis stresses the importance of identity-bound behaviors as well as the need to develop strategies that will enable the sojourners to renegotiate viable identities in the new sociocultural context.

Text and metatext in Hersey's A Single Pebble from the perspective of intercultural communication

An interdisciplinary study of a literary text from the perspectives of both literary scholarship and communication studies is possible under the conditions of expanding applicability of communication models to other fields and the broadening of literary studies to include approaches formerly excluded. This study was undertaken to show the relevance of issues of intercultural communication and models of communication in general to the analysis of issues of concern to the student of literary texts, and to demonstrate the blending of two methodological standpoints. The novel A Single Pebble by John Hersey presents textual structures which complement its ostensible content of interaction by a member of one culture with the members of another. This complementarity may be examined through a model of the interplay of text and metatext in narrative fiction applied to the analysis of an incident in the plot centering upon the disappearance of the protagonist's watch. Because the watch is referred to in a peculiar metaphor at one point, a series of observations on its relationship to the characters, the narrator, and the author are generated in the process of reading out its significance. This is related to the basic situation of the experience of an individual in penetrating an alien culture. The metaphor in which reference to the watch is couched can be taken as emblematic of an ironic authorial stance in Hersey's account of a largely unsuccessful attempt at communication across cultures.