Intercultural competence is an important ability that seems almost necessary for every person to have. This means that people can properly communicate with other people that are from different cultures, values, customs, beliefs, and so on. This also means that there is a certain degree of knowledge, skill, and attitude towards different cultures and accepting them even if they are different from what you are used to. Having all of these important skills means that you are interculturally competent. The reason behind myself taking the class communication in the multicultural world is to gain a better understanding of all the cultures that are out there. Right now I feel like I need to learn more about these cultures and proper ways to communicate …show more content…
My great grandfather on my mom's side came from Ireland. Along with my great grandmother, he came over to the United Sates when he was a young boy. On my dad's side, both of my grandparent's parents came from Poland. I have never met any of my great grandparents on my dad's side but I know that they were born in Poland and moved to the United States when they were in their twenties. I am also unsure on the reasoning for both sets of great grandparents moving out of Poland. There are some other characteristics about myself that make up my own cultural identity. As stated previously, I am half Polish and most of the people living in Poland are Catholic. I grew up in a family where both of my parents are Catholic and used to always attend a Sunday mass at our local Catholic church. I went through a communion and confirmation there but stopped attending church after those ceremonies because I do not consider myself a very religious person that would potentially go every single week. I do still consider myself a Catholic person even though I do not go to my church anymore, but I still have some of the same views that Catholics do. As …show more content…
The first online test that was listed to take was listed under three categories which were knowledge, attitude, and skill. For the categories of attitude and skill I seemed to rank high as opposed to the knowledge category. For the attitudes category I scored the highest. The questions that were asked during this test were things such as do you treat others with respect, do you judge people based on first impressions, are you friendly to new people you encounter, and do you care about another person's feelings? For myself, I believe that I am a person who is kind to everyone that I meet no matter who they are or where they happen to be from. I believe that I show respect to new people and am willing to talk to someone if they want to share their feelings or seem to be feeling upset or angry about something. I enjoy talking to people that are not a part of my culture and feel comfortable doing so. For the skills category I also scored high and it asked questions such as do you listen to people, do you support people's decision to solve problems, and do you reflect your needs and goals? Even if I may not solve a particular problem on the first attempt I am a person who is always willing to try and encourage other people to do so as well. Also, I try to think about multiple
The test that I took before was the Gender-Career IAT test. I will describe the feedbacks and give some of my opinions regarding the test in this essay. Before I began the test, I believed that I would have a negative response toward the female sexual orientation. When I initially finished the Gender-Career IAT test, I definitely knew my score results. I had the "stereotype in my mind" that men would be more "profession minded" and ladies were all the more "family situated". The outcomes decided I had a "solid relationship of "Male with Career" and "Female with Family" contrasted with "female with Career" and "Male with Family". I believed the implicit association test
Lustig, Myron W., and Jolene Koester. Intercultural Competence. 4th ed. San Francisco: Allyn and Bacon, 2003.
Cultural competence has to do with one’s culture. Culture affects among other factors, how children are raised, how families communicate, what is considered normal or abnormal, ways of coping with issues, the way we dress, when and where we seek medical treatment, and so forth. I should know because I come from a very cultural home where it is considered bad to talk to a male doctor about anything gynecological.
Communication competence is the ability to achieve ones goals in manner that is personally acceptable and, ideally acceptable to others. (Adler, 2013) Communication competence is the ability to choose a communication behavior that is both appropriate and effective for a given situation. Interpersonal competency permits one to accomplish their communication goals without initiating the other party to lose face. In order to communicate properly and ideally you must first learn what the best way to address any situation and how it will be most accepted. Are you a competent communicator?
With the current change in demographics throughout the workforce, organizations are feeling the effects of a larger percentage of baby boomers retiring and a large percentage of millennial new entrants. The words used to describe millennial employees, “spoiled, trophy kids, ambitious”, seem to be as everlasting as the constructive and negative perspectives attached to them. Many can debate on the entitlement of these employees within an organization, how these employees can be groomed and managed to better fit the organization, the positive and negative attributes they bring into the workplace, and how the preceding can benefit or derail the effectiveness of an organization. Nonetheless, a harder debate, comes about in denying that organizations must adjust to and integrate these employees into the workforce.
Cultural intelligence is the capability that could give insights on how to cope with multi-cultural situations and how to engage properly in intercultural interactions. It is the individual’s ability to interact effectively in culturally diverse situations (Brislin, Worthley & Macnab, 2006). We could consider the cultural intelligence as constantly improving concept; something we can develop over time and it is not only changes through experience, but also through knowledge as well, which includes communication with other
Cultural proficiency is seeing the difference and responding effectively in a variety of environments. Learning about organizational and individual culture, in which one can effectively interact in a variety of cultural environments (p. 3). In simple terms in which educators are not only able to effectively work with diverse populations, but also believe that diversity adds positive value to the educational enterprise (Landa, 2011, p. 12).
Today’s management in the workforce is composed of all types of people verses thirty years ago when white males held a majority of upper-management positions in companies. These positions are now held by a mixture of ethnic back grounds and women who hold just as many if not more management positions then men. Just by looking at the changes in management demographics shows how important it is for people to understand cultural competency in the workplace. Dr. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. (1999) stated, “Diversity is the collective mixture of whomever we have in our workforce characterized by their differences and similarities” (p.11). Managers and supervisors must understand the characteristics of a diversity mature individual; they also need to be able to articulate the differences between affirmative action, managing diversity, understanding and valuing diversity to build skills that transforms awareness into productive and supportive workplace behaviors.
When individuals or groups from different cultures communicate, this process is called intercultural communication. The transaction process of listening and responding to people from different cultural backgrounds can be challenging. The greater the difference in culture between two people, the greater the potential of misunderstanding and mistrust. Misunderstanding and miscommunication occur between people from different cultures because of different coding rules and cultural norms, which play a major role in shaping the patterns of interaction (Jandt, 2012).
Intercultural communication is an evolving discipline that encapsulates the interactions between individuals or groups from different backgrounds. Diversity and the need for cultural awareness are forever increasing, and this solidifies the direction in which diversity will take in the future. Intercultural communication is going to be a tremendous part of our future and as individuals it will be part of our personal, social and professional relationships.
The increasing impact of globalization has, in recent years, caused a significant shift in the goals of foreign language education from communicative competence to a requirement for intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997). He defined intercultural competence as the ability to establish and maintain relations with members of other culture but not necessarily linked to foreign language proficiency while intercultural communicative competence implies that the learner can do this in a foreign language (Helm & Guth, 2010). However, in a traditional language classroom, the focus of language teaching is to develop reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. If the focus on language teaching is to improve this set of
My father is Protestant, my mother is very Catholic and she raised my brother and me in her faith. Though, despite being the daughter of two Christian parents who come from a backward Catholic country, I never truly connected with Catholicism. I never liked going to church. I dreaded going to bible study and mass every Sunday. I only ever prayed when I needed to do well on exams or when I wanted something to go my way. I never voiced these thoughts, because I feared my family would treat me like a bad Christian and continue to push their conservative beliefs down my throat.
I wasn 't quite sure what I was getting into when I first enrolled in Intercultural Communications. I had assumptions as to the goals of the course such as I would be learning about the way cultures interact with each other, learn about communication in general, or I would be learning about the ways we use communication through our culture. I think that I achieve the latter goal, but I also gained knowledge about more then just my culture. I came to realize that there is more to a culture than just language, appearances, and customs, which are aspects of culture that could be seen above the waterline, or they are more noticeable/obvious to someone outside of that culture. There are aspects of culture that are below the waterline, or more
To elaborate, by mentioning intercultural understanding, I meant that each cultural group has different ways to communicate. For example, Western culture encourages people to be up-front and straight-forward with their communication; contrastly, people who are influenced by Eastern culture might be less outspoken about their ideas and pay a lot of attention to nonverbal language of the people around them. Culture is something that if one have never encountered or exposed to it, he or she would never know. I hope that after this project, besides of the knowledge we gained from the research itselves, all four of us would improve even more on our intercultural and interpersonal communication skills. Because at the end of the day, the knowledge that one have learnt might be forgotten, but all of the skills that one have gained will stay for a very long time.
Abstract: Globalization has made intercultural communication inevitable. Communicating with other cultures characterizes today’s business, classroom, and community. Technology, especially the internet, has increased the probability that whatever is documented online will be read by someone from another culture. Intercultural communication is of importance in any career field, thus the art of knowing how to communicate with other cultures should be a workplace skill that is emphasized. This is a conceptual paper whose purpose is twofold.