Intercultural Scenario
As to the world become more and more globalized, culture difference gradually draws people's attention especially when conflict appears during the communication and even ruins the business between counterparts. Therefore, we need to aware of such differences, and try to make a balance point to resolve the conflicts. By describing the following intercultural scenario, you may find such culture difference is quite interesting.
Last summer, taking a finance-related module, I surprisingly found that the majority of students were Canadians, and only 3 Chinese students including me. Because one of assessments consisted 15% of class participation, our professor preferred to ask bunch of questions during the class. However, gradually he found that ,as each time he posed a question, none of the Chinese would raise their hands and volunteer for an answer, even if they had the answer in the mind.,. Typically, only the Canadians gave the answers and enjoyed participating in the class discussion. And one day, the professor called one of us individually and asked why we were not participating in the discussions. Then, that student told him because he was lack of confidence and afraid to give the wrong answer in which he would lose face in the classroom. The professor got very surprised why we had such feeling because He originally attributed our passiveness was due to lack of interests in this subject. Eventually, he conducted a meeting with three of us to discuss this issue. After the deep communication among us, we found that our behaviors were, to some extent, due to Chinese high-context culture which people preferred implicit expression of their ideas, whereas, the westerners, like our professor, under their low-context culture, favored of explicit expression, and therefore, he projected us before he was aware of this culture difference.
In the light of above example, we know that effective communication plays a key role to find out culture- difference related issue. Therefore, whenever the conversation involves intercultural communication, we should be aware of culture differences, understand them and reach the balance point to resolve them through effective communication.
