key to formative exercises book跨文化交际.doc

Questions for discussion for Unit 1 on P.2 of Formative Exercises Book The similarities of these two diagrams are that both of them show clearly the pattern of communication which is basically the transfer of a message from one person to another and that there are at least three components involved in communication: the message itself, then the sender who encodes the message and finally the receiver who decodes the message. The differences lie in the fact that diagram 1 fails to illustrate clearly what are involved in the course of the transferring of the message, which is shown in Diagram 2. Diagram 1 does not give us any clue to indicate that in normal everyday communication, the message does not always transfer from the sender to the receiver, which is called communication breakdown, while Diagram 2 illustrates such reasons as “age difference”, “boring message”, “emotional state”, “”verbal message differ from non verbal” and so on and so forth as reasons causing the communication breakdown. For example, if a fellow student speaks too fast, I may not catch what he is saying. Or if somebody talks to me about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity which is Creek to me, then I will miss all the message in his speech. Anyway, we can see from these two diagrams that even when two people speak a common language and share a common culture, that is to say, in the mono-cultural communication, communication breakdown is likely to occur for many reasons as listed in Diagram 2. When we add the extra dimension of cultural difference, the process becomes even more complex. That’s why we often say that cross-cultural communication is a risky business, for in cross-cultural communication, there is not only the language problem, but also the cultural differences. Questions for discussion for Unit 2 on P.4 of Formative Exercises Book We know that there are two definitions of a social situation. One is the official definition given by the community. The other is the participant’s d