Major Essay 2: Making Sense of your Experiences using a Theory

Major Essay 2
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Major Essay 2
The emergence of multicultural countries has made it necessary for people from different parts of the world and different cultures to interact. Often the interaction with people from other countries is always marred by various intercultural stumbling blocks as described by LaRay Barna. In his article, Barna identifies six stumbling blocks that may make the communication process very challenging and tedious. The six include, the assumption that all people are the same with similar needs, differences in language, misinterpretation of non-verbal communication, having preconceptions and stereotypes about people, high anxiety and the tendency to evaluate. Even though each of these factors makes communication across different cultures very difficult, language differences and stereotyping are the most common problems as will be discussed in this paper.
Briefly on the assumption of similarities, Barna points out that some individuals wrongly assume that the fact that we all belong to the human race and have the same basic needs, automatically implies that we are the same. He notes that this is a misguided assumption since the different cultures across the world play a big role in shaping these needs, beliefs and values in a way that largely affects the communication process. Other people adapt this assumption of sameness since “it reduces the discomfort of dealing with difference,” (Barna, 1985). Language differences affect communication especially when an individual understands specific meanings of words and sticks to them without looking at the alternative meanings. On non-verbal misinterpretations, Barna explains that whatever ways people see, feel, smell or hear is all dependent on what these senses mean in different cultures. Therefore interpreting these sensory realities outside the frame of that culture might make communication a problem. Barna describes preconceptions and stereotypes as having already-formed notions about people and their culture in a way that makes their behavior easily predictable. Notably, stereotyping people makes it hard to learn the reality of a person thereby hindering intercultural communication. Concerning the tendency to evaluate, it is human nature to assume that our own culture is the most appropriate and the right one (Keles, 2013). This assumption often leads to biasness against the others outside our cultures to an extent that it becomes almost impossible to embrace the behaviors and attitudes of others with an open-mindedness (Barna, 1985). Lastly, Barna also describes high anxiety or stress as a stumbling block to intercultural communication. Notably, people in cross-cultural communication often are anxious due to the many uncertainties they could meet. In some cases, people develop defenses as a way of dealing with this anxiety, and this may serve as an obstacle to the communication process particularly where the defenses are in form of hostility or withdrawal.
A language barrier or language differences is a problem that is common when...