English language as a means of cross-cultural communication

Novozhilova M.V., Loshkova I. G.

M.Kh. Dulaty Taraz State University

Introduction

In our time of globalization, we have more to be exposed to and share with than ever before in terms of culture- beliefs, worldviews, values, attitudes and ideologies- but at the same time much of them remains different and unshared, which is enhanced by raising people’s awareness of cultural, ethnic, and religious identities.

The Internet and modern technology have opened up new marketplaces, and allow us to promote our businesses to new geographic locations and cultures. And given that it can now be as easy to work with people remotely as it is to work face-to-face, cross-cultural communication is increasingly the new norm.

Today, we communicate beyond the national borders by e-mailing, chatting, blogging, webbrowsing besides speaking and writing. In these days of global networking, we are thrown into the society of deterritorialized, hybrid, changing and conflicting cultures, where we are expected to become pluricultural individuals. In the light of cross-cultural communication, the language policy and planning of the Council of Europe is a grand experiment based on plurilingualism and pluriculturalism.

Effective communication with people of different cultures is especially challenging. Cultures provide people with ways of thinking - ways of seeing, hearing, and interpreting the world. Thus the same words can mean different things to people from different cultures, even when they talk the " same" language. When the languages are different, and translation has to be used to communicate, the potential for misunderstandings increases.

It is important to teach our students cross-cultural values and attitudes and their impact on how we communicate across cultures.

Our cultural milieu shapes our world view in such a way that reality is thought to be objectively perceived through our own cultural pattern, and a differing perception is seen as either false or ‘strange” and is thus oversimplified. If people recognize and understand differing world views, they will usually adopt a positive and open-minded attitude towards cross-cultural differences. A close-minded view of such differences often results in the maintenance of a stereotype – an oversimplification and blanket assumption. A stereotype assigns group characteristics to individuals purely on the basis of their cultural membership.[1]

The stereotype may be accurate in depicting the “typical” member of a culture, but it is inaccurate for describing a particular individual, simply because every person is unique and all of a person’s behavioral characteristics cannot be accurately predicted on the basis of overgeneralized median point along a continuum of cultural norms. To judge a single member of a culture by overall traits of the culture is both to prejudge and to misjudge that person. Worse, stereotypes have a way of potentially devaluing people from other cultures.

Sometimes our oversimplified concepts of members of another culture are downright false.

While stereotyping, or over generalizing, people from other cultures should be avoided, cross-cultural research has shown that there are indeed characteristics of culture that make one culture different from another.

Learners and teachers of a foreign language need to understand cultural differences, to recognize openly that people are not all the same beneath the skin. There are real differences between groups and cultures. We can learn to perceive those differences, appreciate them, and above all to respect and value the personhood of every human being.

Because learning a foreign language implies some degree of learning a foreign culture, it is important to understand what we mean by the process of cultural learning. Many students in foreign language classrooms learn the language with little or no sense of the depth of cultural norms and patterns of the people who speak the language. Another perspective was the notion that a foreign language curriculum could present culture as “a list of facts to be cognitively consumed” by the student, devoid of any significant interaction with the culture. Robinson-Stuart and Nocon, casting those perspectives aside as ineffective and misconceived, suggested that language learners undergo culture learning as a “process, that is, as a way of perceiving, interpreting, feeling, being in the world, … and relating to where one is and who one meets’.[2] Culture learning is a process of creating shared meaning between cultural representatives. It is experiential, a process that continues over years of language learning, and penetrates deeply into one’s patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Second language learning involves the acquisition of a second identity. This creation of a new identity is at the heart of culture learning, or what some might call acculturation.

Stella Ting-Toomey describes three ways in which culture interferes with effective cross-cultural understanding. [3]

First is what she calls " cognitive constraints." These are the frames of reference or world views that provide a backdrop that all new information is compared to or inserted into.

Second are " behavior constraints." Each culture has its own rules about proper behavior which affect verbal and nonverbal communication. Whether one looks the other person in the eye-or not; whether one says what one means overtly or talks around the issue; how close the people stand to each other when they are talking--all of these and many more are rules of politeness which differ from culture to culture.

Ting-Toomey's third factor is " emotional constraints." Different cultures regulate the display of emotion differently. Some cultures get very emotional when they are debating an issue. They yell, they cry, they exhibit their anger, fear, frustration, and other feelings openly. Other cultures try to keep their emotions hidden, exhibiting or sharing only the " rational" or factual aspects of the situation.

All of these differences tend to lead to communication problems. If the people involved are not aware of the potential for such problems, they are even more likely to fall victim to them, although it takes more than awareness to overcome these problems and communicate effectively across cultures.

The key to effective cross-cultural communication is knowledge. First, it is essential that people understand the potential problems of cross-cultural communication, and make a conscious effort to overcome these problems. Second, it is important to assume that one’s efforts will not always be successful, and adjust one’s behavior appropriately.

We communicate so much information nonverbally in conversations that often the verbal aspect of the conversation is negligible. This is particularly true for interactive language functions in which social contact is of key importance and in which it is not what you say that counts but how you say it—what you convey with body language, gestures, eye contact, physical distance, and other nonverbal messages. Nonverbal communication, however, is so subtle and subconscious in a native speaker that verbal language seems, by comparison, quite mechanical and systematic. Language becomes distinctly human through its nonverbal dimension, or what Edward Hall called the " silent language." The expression of culture is so bound up in nonverbal communication that the barriers to culture learning are more nonverbal than verbal. Verbal language requires the use of only one of the five sensory modalities: hearing. But there remain in our communicative repertoire three other senses by which we communicate every day, if we for the moment rule out taste as falling within а сcommunicative category (though messages are indeed sent and received through the taste modality). We will examine each of these.