global village 6 communication 12 symbol 13 meaning 13 message 13 interpretive 14 understanding 14 agreement 15 transactional 16 feedback 16 context 17 process 19 shared meanings

19 Chapter 1: Introduction To Intercultural Competence: Key Terms: - Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village to describe the consequences of the mass media's ability to bring events from the far reaches of the globe into people's homes, thus shrinking the world. - Communication: To understand intercultural communication events, you must first study the more general processes involved in all human communication transactions. All communication events, including intercultural ones, are made up of a set of basic characteristics. Once these characteristics are known, they can be applied to intercultural interactions in order to analyze the unique ways in which intercultural communication differs from other forms of communication. . The term communication has been used in many ways for varied, and often inconsistent, purposes. . Communication is a symbolic, interpretive, transactional, contextual process in which people create shared meanings. - A symbol is a word, action, or object that stands for or represents a unit of meaning. - Meaning, in turn, is a perception, thought, or feeling that a person experiences and might want to communicate to others. - A message, then, refers to the "package" of symbols used to create shared meanings. For example, the words in this book are symbols that, taken together, form the message that we, the authors, want to communicate to you. - Messages do not have to be consciously or purposefully created with the specific intention of communicating a certain set of meanings for others to be able to make sense of the symbols forming the message. Rather, communication is always an interpretive process. - The first outcome of communication is understanding what the others are trying to communicate. Understanding means that the participants have imposed similar or shared interpretations about what the messages actually mean. Indeed, without some degree of understanding between the participants, it would be inaccurate to claim that communication has even occurred. - The second outcome is reaching agreement on the particular issues that have been discussed. Agreement means that each participant not only understands the other's interpretations but also holds a view that is similar. However, although understanding is a necessary ingredient to say that communication has occurred, agreement is not a requirement of communication. - To suggest that communication is transactional implies that all participants in the communication process work together to create and sustain the meanings that develop. A transactional view holds that communicators are simultaneously sending and receiving messages at every instant that they are involved in conversations. - The interactional view explicitly includes the receiver in the communication process, and it recognizes that the receivers provide the senders with ongoing responses, called feedback, about how the messages are received. - All communication takes place within a setting or situation called a context. By context, we mean the place where people meet, the social purpose for being together, and the nature of the relationship. Thus, the context includes the physical, social, and interpersonal settings within which messages are exchanged.

- People, relationships, activities, objects, and experiences can be described either in static terms or as part of a dynamic process. Viewing communication in static terms suggests that it is fixed and unchanging, whereas viewing it as a process implies that things are changing, moving, developing, and evolving. - The interpretive and transactional nature of communication suggests that correct meanings are not just "out there" to be discovered. Rather, meanings are created and shared by groups of people as they participate in the ordinary and everyday activities that form the context for common interpretations. The focus, therefore, must be on the ways that people attempt to "make sense" of their common experiences in the world. culture 25 beliefs 27 values 27 norms 27 social practices 27 behaviors 28 nation 30 race 30 ethnicity 32 subculture 32 co-culture 32 history 33 ecology 35 biology 39 institutional networks 41 interpersonal communication patterns 43 intercultural communication 52 intracultural communication 53 interracial communication 53 interethnic communication 53 cross-cultural communication 54 international communication 55 Chapter 2: Culture and Intercultural Communication Key Terms: - Consequently, our definition of culture is one that allows us to investigate how culture contributes to human symbolic processes. Our goal in presenting a particular definition of culture is to explain the important link between culture and communication. Culture is a learned set of shared interpretations about beliefs, values, norms, and social practices, which affect the behaviors of a relatively large group of people. - Beliefs refer to the basic understanding of a group of people about what the world is like or what is true or false. - Values refer to what a group of people defines as good and bad or what it regards as important. - Norms refer to rules for appropriate behavior, which provide the expectations people have of one another and of themselves. - Social practices are the predictable behavior patterns that members of a culture typically follow. - However, these shared interpretations about beliefs, values, and norms affect the behaviors of large groups of people. In other words, the social practices that characterize a culture give people guidelines about what things mean, what is important, and what should or should not be done. - Nation is a political term referring to a government and a set of formal and legal mechanisms that regulate the political behavior of its people. - Race commonly refers to certain physical similarities, such as skin color or eye shape, that are shared by a group of people and are used to mark or separate them from others. - Ethnicity is actually a term that is used to refer to a wide variety of groups who might share a language, historical origins, religion, nation-state, or cultural system. - Subculture is also a term sometimes used to refer to racial and ethnic minority groups that share both a common nation-state with other cultures and some aspects of the larger culture. - Co-culture has become more commonly used in an effort to avoid the implication of a hierarchical relationship between the European American culture and these other important cultural groups that form the mosaic of the United States.

- The unique experiences that have become part of a culture's collective wisdom constitute its history. - The external environment in which the culture lives is the culture's ecology. It includes such physical forces as the overall climate, the changing weather patterns, the prevailing land and water formations, and the availability or unavailability of certain foods and other raw materials. - The inherited characteristics that cultural members share are the result of biology, as people with a common ancestry have similar genetic compositions. - Institutional networks are the formal organizations in societies that structure activities for large numbers of people. These include government, education, religion, work, professional associations, and even social organizations. - The face-to-face verbal and nonverbal coding systems that cultures develop to convey meanings and intentions are called interpersonal communication patterns. These patterns include links among parents, siblings, peers, teachers, relatives, neighbors, employers, authority figures, and other social contacts. - People are from different cultures whenever the degree of difference between them is sufficiently large and important that it creates dissimilar interpretations and expectations about what are regarded as competent communication behaviors. - Intercultural communication occurs when large and important cultural differences create dissimilar interpretations and expectations about how to communicate competently. -