D. Contextual Influences Or Rules In Culture

We have defined culture as a set of rules established and used by a group of people to conduct social interaction. These rules determine what is considered correct communicative behavior, including both verbal and nonverbal elements, for both physical and social (situational) contexts. For example, you would not normally attend a funeral wearing shorts and tennis shoes or talk on your cell phone during the service. Your culture has taught you that these behaviors are contextually inappropriate (i.e., disrespectful).

Context is also an important consideration in intercultural communication interactions, where the rules for specific situations usually vary. What is appropriate in one culture is not necessarily correct in another. As an example, among most White U.S. Americans, church services are relatively serious occasions, but among African American congregations, services are traditionally more demonstrative, energetic gatherings.

In a restaurant in Germany, the atmosphere is usually somewhat subdued, with customers engaging in quiet conversation. In Spain, however, the conversation is much louder and more animated. In U.S. universities, students are expected to interactively engage the instructor, but in Japan the expectation is that the instructor will simply lecture, with very little or no interaction.

In these examples, we see the importance of having an awareness of the cultural rules governing the context of an intercultural communication exchange. Unless all parties in the exchange are sensitive to how culture affects the contextual aspects of communication, difficulties will most certainly arise and could negate effective interaction.

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT ORGANIZATION: LOGISTICS, SUBHEADINGS, CONTEXT, KEY WORDS, SPECIFIC WORDS

Instruction: Discovering text organization through its logistics. The detailed organization and implementation of text essentials is discovered by using the techniques of surveying, scanning and skim reading which help you find information about the topic of the whole text and its parts. These techniques will also tell you something about how the text is organized. While you are reading, you will probably find some ambiguous words or word combinations. However, this does not have to be a problem. Firstly, you should decide whether the word is important for you. Understanding the word may not be necessary to understand the text. If you think a word is important, there are some strategies given below you can use to help guess the meaning of the word.

Guessing the Meaning of Words