READING/LISTENING

On a website www.bbclearningenglish.com you can read and listen to a series of talks about culture and how it affects us. It explores some of the major differences between cultures and looks at what happens when people from different cultures meet and communicate. The series is presented by Marc Beeby. You can download the scripts of these talks free of charge and listen to the talks online.

Exercise 1. Read and listen to Part 1ofthe series about culture on the website www.bbclearningenglish.com. You can use the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/tae_whoonearth_archive.shtml

Part I

What’s culture like? How does culture affect the way we behave, how we see the world? And do we behave and see the world in a different way from people with another cultural background?

Talking about culture in any way is surprisingly hard - even describing what our own culture is like can be difficult, and it is even harder to say how our culture affects the way we behave. And what about ‘foreign’ cultures? We may have a few ideas about what ‘foreigners’ are like, but are these ideas based on truth, or are they just stereotypes – simple and inaccurate pictures of people we don’t know very well. Stereotypes are the preconceived ideas that we have about a different culture - so we might say that in Italy they spend all their time eating spaghetti or the Chinese are very hard-working. And by having a stereotype in mind ironically what we also do is that we look to satisfy that stereotype in our minds so that’s preventing us from seeing other things that also exist in that culture.

The world, we hear, is getting smaller. Global business, worldwide tourism, faster and more accessible ways of communicating all mean that most of us, at some point in our lives, will come into contact with people from cultures that are very different from our own. And when that happens we find ourselves facing some very interesting, very personal questions.

Part II

Rebecca Fong teaches a course in intercultural communication at the University of the West of England.

Rebecca Fong: When I was quite young I went to live in Japan, and after having been there for a little while I was asked by some of the women I was working with if I'd like to do 'Ikebana' which is Japanese flower arranging. I decided not to, but I did go to many flower arranging exhibitions and one day I was at one of these exhibitions and I saw an arrangement and I laughed and I said 'oh well that one was obviously done by a beginner ' and the person I was with who had been studying for a long time said 'no no that was done by an expert and I could never do that, that's very hard'. I later discovered that when the Japanese are looking at flower arrangement they see something that we don't see. Because they've been trained in flower arranging and trained in the understanding or appreciation of the art of flower arranging they can appreciate it for its beauty in a way that I was completely unable to see when I first went to the country. Think about what this implies for the way that we see beauty. We were both looking at the same object at the same time but they were seeing something completely different. What this implies is that we're all wearing culture tinted glasses if you like. We're looking at things and judging their value from our own cultural backgrounds and our own experience, which is often very different.

Part III

No problem with that, of course…. until we meet people who see, judge, and do things differently. But then a misunderstanding might suddenly occur. The reason that something has gone wrong is that your culture and the other person's culture have collided.

When the Venezuelan president came to Spain for an official visit he came to the king in Spain and hugged him. That’s something that you never do. You don’t go and hug the King of a country just like that. And the president of Venezuela did it because he was used to that and for him that was the normal thing to do and if that happened with a president and a king that happen everywhere.

We all grow up inside our own cultures and what this means is that we assume without thinking a number of different values, attitudes, beliefs, ways of doing things, ways of saying things which come to us naturally - but the way we do things is not necessarily the same as the way people in other cultures do them and it is not until something goes wrong that you're going to realize that the way someone else does something is different from the way that you do it.

When Rajni Baldani from India first went to England she was absolutely shocked. There were three of them, two Indians and there was one English person, who whilst he was talking, right in the middle of the conversation took out a banana, peeled it and started eating it. And he was peeling the banana and eating it without even saying 'excuse me'. They expected to be offered. That is something that is culturally very different.

When there's a cultural misunderstanding like this, the temptation can be to think 'Well they've got a stupid way of doing it - why don't they do it like we do it' and you find that your standards become the standards by which you judge everybody else.

So how can we avoid cultural misunderstanding and the possibility of conflict? What do we need to learn to be able to communicate better with people from other cultures and so become ‘inter-culturally competent?’ We could study the other culture - find out what food people eat, what their economy is like, learn about their history, read books, get the facts….

But intercultural communication is a bit more sophisticated than that. It is not only about the knowledge that we gain by reading books or watching documentaries about a certain other culture. It's really much more about what happens when we meet someone from that culture and we interact with them. Their behaviour patterns will be culturally specific - just as ours are. So how do we act in different situations, how do we respond to things - do we respond verbally or non-verbally, how close can we stand to someone when we're talking to them. So what that involves is not just learning facts about another culture but also the competence that you get from actually engaging in an encounter with someone from another culture.

Studying culture and intercultural communication can help make communication across cultures easier. It can help make us more tolerant of ‘difference’ and things that are ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’.

Exercise 2. In pairs take turns to answer the questions.

1. What is a stereotype?

2. Do we see the world in a different way from people with a different cultural background? Give an example from the text.

3. What gives us an opportunity to come into contact with people from different cultures?

4. How can we avoid cultural misunderstanding and the possibility of conflict?

5. What is intercultural communication?

6. What examples of cultural misunderstanding can you find in the text?

7. Why is it important to study culture and intercultural communication?

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