Personal Brief : Olivia Aukafolau Essay

As one of the most ethnically diverse countries today, Australia is home to people from over two hundred countries, with different backgrounds, stories, cultures and religions. Multiculturalism has had vast impacts on Australia, as reflected in the country's mainstream diet, lifestyle and cultural practices that has shaped the Australian identity. However, Australia's diversity has also caused social and cultural tensions as well as racism and isolation, as clearly shown in both Aditi Gouvernel's "Wei-Lei and Me" and Shalini Akhil's "Destiny", two memoirs revealing different perspectives on growing up Australian through different experiences in their childhood years. Gouvernel was a victim of racism at her primary school, and as a result, experienced isolation and bullying from her peers. However, Akhil's memoir shows the positive outcome that multiculturalism can have when one culture is strengthened

Different social, professional and cultural contexts may affect relationships and the way people communicate due to of a lack of understanding or knowledge of one another’s background and culture. This could be through their race, religion, ethnicity or where they come from. Each one of these can have similar or very different ways to communicate. For example

ASSIGNMENT: Achieving competence as an interpersonal communicator in a diverse society is necessary to your personal and professional success. One way to enhance our understanding of interpersonal communication as a relationship-building activity is to engage in first hand dialogue with people from cultures other than your own. This assignment gives you the opportunity to engage in the dual perspective – honoring the perspective of the person with whom you are communicating as well as honoring your own perspective. You are also able to contrast your worldview with the perspective of someone with a different life experience than your

Intercultural Communication is the process that occurs when members of two or more cultures or co-cultures exchange messages in a manner that is influenced by their different cultural perceptions and symbol systems, both verbal and

To me interpersonal communication describes the exchange of verbal and nonverbal messages between two different people. Joseph DeVito states that “interpersonal communication is inevitable, irreversible, and unrepeatable” due to these things effective communication is a necessary skill for us to function in our day to day lives (p. 20). Therefore, I have created a theory for interpersonal communication that goes as follows; To experience effective communication you must understand: your culture, the other person’s culture, and how to listen effectively. By knowing these three things you can consistently avoid misunderstandings and promote understanding in your interpersonal and intercultural relationships.

My γιαγιά , Catherine Fotiou, was Born in 1948, Rhodes Greece on the 26th of July. She was one of four children she had an amazing life journey across a big sea to a foreign land she had never seen before. She still remembers the sound of the wind, hitting the sails of Kirina. She had Migrated to Australia in 1951 by boat across the Atlantic Sea from her motherland home, to the foreign “Australia”.

In our world of expanding technology and shrinking geography, people of different cultures have increasing frequency of contact and need for effective communication on a daily basis. Whether through travel, immigration, or international business, having the ability to communicate across many different cultures is an advantage in and of itself. Speaking a different language is an obvious obstacle to intercultural communication, but a greater and more difficult hurdle is to “speak” a different culture. To understand and comprehend and even apply these tiniest

As the novel progresses she starts to realize that it doesn’t matter where you come from, you’re as special as anyone else, she says “I’m an Australian with Italian blood flowing rapidly through my veins. I’ll say that with pride, because it’s pride that I feel”’ (By using repetition of the word ‘pride’ demonstrates her change in self perception and her confidence in her cultural identity, it also re-enforces that she has pride in herself).

Because communication between two people of different cultures is very challenging, there has been extensive research/studies conducted on this topic. This idea was also very interesting to me because I attended a highly diverse high school, in which we had a Global Studies program where international students were invited to come and learn at our school. The immersion of the different cultures was very difficult to adapt to at first because it was new to a lot of us students who have never attended a school where international students were amongst us in the halls, but as the days went on it became normal to me.

Today, we live in a culturally diverse society due to globalization. As our world grows, expands and become increasingly more interconnected, the need for effective interpersonal communication among differing cultures has become apparent. When people from different cultures interact with one another there is intercultural communication because different cultures create different interpretation and expectations about what is seen as competent behaviors that will enable the construction of shared meanings.

Being able to understand how people from different cultures and religions communicate, interact, and perceive the environment around them allows for the formation of important guidelines and practices which help combat and avoid anxiety and uncertainty in government, business, and personal intercultural relationships for the purpose of efficient negotiations and merges different cultures into more tolerant cohesive existence.

Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2011). Experiencing intercultural communication. (4th ed., pp. 226-227). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Intercultural communication to me means many things. It mainly means the way that people communicate throughout the different cultures that they derive from. Intercultural communication is basically the way that one person from a particular country would communicate with someone from America. Every culture has their own set of non-verbal gestures that could mean something completely different to

Humans have been communicating since four million years. On the other hand, the birth of culture is estimated to have taken place about 35,000 years ago. Today, both culture and communication have evolved considerably and have become interdependent of one another, to the point that communication is considered to be a product of culture. Thus, our own culture has a deep impact on our thoughts and behaviors. Since each culture has its distinct aspects, intercultural communication can be the cause of conflict and disorder. There are three main issues which are at the root of the problem of intercultural miscommunication : language as a barrier, cultural diversity and ethnocentrism. I will analyze

Intercultural communication competence refers to the ability of an individual to adapt and communicate appropriately and effectively across a wide array of cultural contexts. That is to say, for an individual to be considered an intercultural communicator they must understand other’s cultures as well as they understand their own, and apply this understanding to communication (Chen 1-2). With the increasing diversity at the workplace, school and other social settings, it has become increasingly important to learn how to communicate with people from a diverse array of cultures. More importantly, adapting to a more effective intercultural communication competence model provides us with learning opportunities occasioned by the interaction with people from other backgrounds. The intercultural communication competence model comes with some key components including tolerance for uncertainty, self-knowledge, and motivation. The greatest and most important of these aspects is motivation. An individual must be willing to foster relationships with people from a different cultural background. If an individual lacks the willingness to promote intercultural relationships, then other aspects of the intercultural communication model become moot.