外经贸跨文化交际导论期末考试——重要概念

Edward Hall the founder of ICC Edward Hall conceptualized this new field of ICC in the early 1950s. The Silent Language (Hall, 1959) is considered the classic fundamental book of ICC study. Communication Defined Communication can simply refer to the act and process of sending and receiving messages among people “Communication occurs whenever meaning is attributed to behavior or the residue of behavior.” Attribution means that we draw upon our past experiences and give meaning to the behavior that we observe. Residue refers to those things that remain as a record of our actions. A sender refers to the person who sends the message, while a receiver is the one who receives the message. A message verbal or nonverbal carries ideas from one person to another. A verbal message includes oral message and written message. A nonverbal message has more uncertainties than the verbal one. Medium/Channel refers to the ways for sending and receiving messages. Different messages ask for different channels. Noise refers to the disturbances along the communication processes, which may result in unintended message perceived by the receiver. Feedback refers to the reaction from the message receiver to the message sender. Feedback can be further divided into two pairs: positive feedback vs. negative feedback; internal feedback vs. external feedback. Encoding refers to the process of the sender putting the message into a signal (the encoded message); Decoding refers to the process of the receiver interpreting the signal from the sender. Definition of culture Culture is the arts and other manifestation of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Communication is culture, and culture is communication. The culture is both an influence factor for behavior as well as an interpretation factor of behavior. Culture may be classified by three large categories of elements: Artifact (which include items ranging from arrowheads to hydrogen bombs, magic charms to electric lights, and chariots to jet planes) Concepts (which include such beliefs or value systems as right or wrong, God and man, ethnic, and the general meaning of life) Behavior (which refers to the actual practice of concepts or beliefs) Ethnocentrism is a universal tendency for any people to put its own culture and society in a central position of priority and worth. Concept of Values Concise Oxford Dictionary defines values as “ Ones principles or standards, ones judgment of what is valuable or important in life.” Hofstede says values are “a broad tendency to prefer certain states of affairs over others.” Kluckhohn says values are “ a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action.” A value system, as Albert notes, “represents what is expected or hoped for, required or forbidden. It is not a report of actual conduct but is the system of criteria by which conduct is judged and sanctions applied.” Hofstede states that these four levels embody the total concept of culture like an onion with 4 layers: symbols, heroes, rituals, and values. Symbols are the first “skin of the onion”, the outer layer, which are words, gestures, pictures, or objects that carry a particular meaning only recognized by those who share the culture, e.g. words, dress, hairstyles, flags, etc. Symbols represent the most superficial and the easiest to perceive by an outsider and the least important to an insider. “Heroes” is a term used to indicate persons, ordinary or famous, real or imagery, as long as they possess characteristics that are highly prized and worshipped in a culture, e.g. Yue Fei, George Washington, etc. The worship and heroes are less obvious to the eye than symbols. Rituals are those collective activities that are considered socially essential within a culture. They are carried out for their own sake. Values are social principles, goals, or standards accepted by persons in a culture.Values are the deepest manifestations of culture and the most difficult to understand by an outsider. Kluckholn and Strodtbecks values orientations Human Nature Relationship to Nature Sense of Time Activity Activity Social Relationships Hofstedes four cultural dimensions Individualism vs. Collectivism Power distance Uncertainty avoidance Masculinity vs. Femininity Individualism indicates the extent to which a society is a loosely knit social framework in which people are supposed to take care of only of themselves and their immediate families. Collectivism emphasizes common interests, conformity, cooperation, and interdependence. It indicates a tight social framework in which people distinguish between in-groups and out-groups and expect their in-groups to look after them. In-groups includes your immediate family, your extended family, your relatives, your acquaintances, your friends, your classmates, your colleagues etc. people you regard as part of your group, those who are close to you, who have a closer relation with you. Out-group refers to people who are basically strangers, who only have business relationships with you, who are not close to you. Power distance indicates the extent to which a society accepts the fact that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally among individuals. Uncertainty avoidance indicates the extent to which a society feels threatened by ambiguous situation and tries to avoid them by providing rules, believing in absolute truths, and refusing to tolerate deviance. Masculinity indicates the extent to which the dominant values in a society tend towards assertiveness, acquisition of things and away from concern for people, and the quality of life. Masculinity implies aggressiveness and assertiveness; Femininity stresses nurturing, caring attention to peoples feelings and needs. In high-context cultures most of the information is in the physical context or is internalized in the people who are a part of the interaction. Very little information is actually coded in the verbal message. People tend to be more aware of their surroundings and their environment and do not rely on verbal communication as their main information source. The context of the message is well understood by both sender and receiver. In low-context cultures, such as German and American, however, most of the information is contained in the verbal message, and very little is embedded in the context or within the participants. Verbal messages are extremely important in low-context cultures. Low-context people who rely primarily on verbal messages for information are perceived as less attractive and less credible by people in high-context cultures. language determinism (Sapir (2) Regulating; (3) Conveying; (4) Modifying; (5) Repeating; (6) Complementing; (7) Contradicting Cultural differences in salient areas of nonverbal communication in six groups: (1) Kinesics (body movement), (2) Oculesics (eye contact), (3) Haptics (touching), (4) Paralanguage, (5) Proxemics (spatial language) and (6) Chronemics (temporal language) Paralanguage includes the nonverbal voice qualities such as tone, rate, pitch, volume, accents, laughing, crying and shouting, which interrupt or temporarily take the place of speech and affect the meaning of a message. Researchers divide paralanguage into three categories: voice quality, vocal qualifiers, and vocalization The vocal qualifier refers to tone, volume, pitch, rhythm, tempo, resonance, of the spoken word and stresses, etc. All cultures use nonword noises such as “uh-huh,” “aha,” “um,” “er,” sucking in ones breath, or clicking ones tongue. They are called vocal segregates (vocalization). These noises may be used as connectors between ideas; they may also be used to indicate that someone is ready to say something or that more time is needed to think things over. Related to the nonword vocalizers are fillers, e.g. okay, you know, etc. Spatial language (the technical word is proxemics) is the study of the way that people use physical space to conve