Communicating Differently

Week 3 Blog Posting

Strangers, people different from us, stir up fear, discomfort, suspicion, and hostility. They make us lose our sense of security just by being 'other'.
Henri J. M. Nouwen as quoted in Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond (2011)

I teach in an International school here in Turkey, though most of the students are Turkish, however, about 30 percent of the students and half of the teaching staff are from other countries such as the UK, the USA, Canada, Jamaica, Australia, India, Pakistan, etc. I am the only African in the school and as such I have been communicating with people from different cultural backgrounds since I came to the school.

Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond (2011) noted that in the US today it is not uncommon to encounter people who do not speak your language, even if your language is English! This obviously will be a great challenge and from my experience here I can agree no less. Ultimately, your ability to communicate effectively and appropriately with others is a product of whether you can understand each other's verbal and non-verbal codes (Beebe et al., 2011). I have experienced the frustration of getting to the grocery shop and not being able to communicate with the shop attendant and that of boarding a bus and not being able to communicate with the bus driver and the entire passenger all because I do not speak the same language with the people.

Another way I communicate differently with the people, especially the Turkish people is through the non-verbal cues. For example, I am used to waving down a taxi if I needed one, I have done this several times without the taxi drivers I waved to responding to me as expected, it was just recently in one of my classes that a students described how to call a taxi in Turkey that I understood what the problem was.

Effective communication remains the pillar upon which relationships are established, nurtured, and maintained. From the learning resources and discussions this week, I have learned some strategies that I can use in order to improve on my communication with people from different cultural backgrounds in my school. The strategies include 1. Development of appropriate knowledge of others through questing and listening, as Beebe et al., (2011) suggested, this will help reduce the barrier pose by the use of different codes in communication. 2. Being mindful and open-minded. 3. Avoiding negative judgments and being respectful of others culture.

Reference

Beebe, S. A., Beebe, S. J., & Redmond, M. V. (2011). Interpersonal communication: Relating to others (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.