Context in Interethnic Communication

Anne-Kathrin Müller

Apr 2005 · GRIN Verlag

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Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen (Department of English), course: Context, Contextualisation, and Sociolinguistics, language: English, abstract: Today’s world becomes smaller and smaller because of the development of new transport and technology. It becomes normal to move away from one’s home town e.g. in oder to find employment. Therefore, the need to communicate with people of one’s own culture (family, friends) increases. Additionally, most people make use of the arising new opportunities and fly to foreign countries where we get into contact with people of other cultures. We try to stay in touch with them because technology allows for it: telphone, email, webcams, and chat make it possible for us to talk to someone e.g. in Australia as if s/he was actually here. It becomes normal for people to learn foreign languages and to communicate with people that belong to another nation in their surrounding aswell as in one’s own surrounding because people come to our country in order to get to know a different people, too. Today, the usage of foreign media is normal for us and exchange does not stop at national borders. We feel that our need to communicate in general becomes greater and greater. Hence, we have to become sensitive to other people’s cultural and communicative specifics in order to enjoy the international exchange and to understand the other person in the right way. That means that we have to learn about intercultural/interethnic communication. Three complex building blocks in understanding intercultural communication can be defined and will be analysed in the first chapter: communication, culture and context. As communication and culture are interrelated and as they both interact with context, we first need to look at the former two. Context then serves as the necesseray background against which intercultural communication can be understood. The development of an understanding of intercultural communication will lead to an overview of problems in interethnic conversations, such as misunderstandings, stereotypes and prejudices, intercultural communication apprehension, and fossiliation. This then serves as a basis for outlining methods of how miscommunication can be solved.