Intercultural Communication

Cultural differences manifest themselves in many different ways. In some schools, hospitality might be a cup of tea and biscuits with the headteacher, in other parts of the world, every child in the school might be outside ready to throw rose petals in the visitors path.

 

Surface Level:

•Culture enacted and reinforced through visible codes, appearances, behaviours

•Respond to people and situations based on ways we have learned, the values, beliefs and assumptions that we hold.

Middle Level:

Here, culture is manifested through our

•Values – how we learnt to think things ought to be or people ought to behave especially in terms of qualities such as honesty, integrity and openness

Beliefs – how we think things really are, what we think is really true and what we expect as likely consequences to our actions.

Deepest Level

Here culture is manifested through our:

•Basic assumptions – our long learnt, automatic responses and established opinions

We are almost always unaware of the nature of our basic assumptions but they are enacted through our behaviour and are usually rooted in our early family life and social context.