1: Culture and Communication
- Page ID
- 113901
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- 1.1: Why Study Intercultural Communication?
- We live in a rapidly changing world with larger forces driving us to interact with others who are culturally different from ourselves. It would be easy to be overcome by the complexities of the things that you do not know or understand about another culture, but regardless of who we are communicating with, one fact is important to remember: the communication choices we make determine the personal, national, and international outcomes that follow.
- 1.2: Communication Principles and Process
- Most of us admit that communication is important, but it’s often in the back of our minds or viewed as something that “just happens.” Putting communication at the front of your mind and becoming more aware of how you communicate can be informative and have many positive effects. In this section, as we learn the principles of communication.
- 1.3: Foundations of Culture
- Culture is a complicated word to define, as there are at least six common ways that culture is used in the United States. For the purposes of exploring the communicative aspects of culture, we will define culture as the ongoing negotiation of learned and patterned beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors. Unpacking the definition, we can see that culture shouldn’t be conceptualized as stable and unchanging.
- 1.4: Understanding Intercultural Communication
- It is through intercultural communication that we come to create, understand, and transform culture and identity. Intercultural communication is communication between people with differing cultural identities.
- 1.5: Intercultural Communication Competence
- Throughout this book we have been putting various tools in our communication toolbox to improve our communication competence. Many of these tools can be translated into intercultural contexts. While building any form of competence requires effort, building intercultural communication competence often requires us to take more risks. Some of these risks require us to leave our comfort zones and adapt to new and uncertain situations. In this section, we will learn some of the skills needed to be an