Development of a Cultural Self-Awareness Approach to Instruction in Intercultural Communication

Abstract : When persons of differing cultural backgrounds attempt to communicate with each other, each makes unwarranted, culturally conditioned assumptions about the other, making communication difficult. An exercise was designed to reduce this effect through increased cultural self-awareness. To facilitate this difficult process, operations were grouped into sequences, with each sequence showing several manifestations of the same cultural influence while noncultural influences were varied from excerpt to excerpt. In each sequence, the cultural influence was a common element gradually brought into focus.