Evaluating intercultural Behavior

1.     Knowing them. To get into their culture background, to talk with them, standardize common rules in communication. To show your efforts and dedications in trying to know them and willing to talk with them.

2.     Non-verbal communication is intensively used in intercultural communication if the people involved in the communication not knowing each other’s language. 

These two points are the essential to the effectiveness of intercultural communication. There is a scenario as follows to illustrate how to conduct an effective intercultural communication.

I have been travelled to Europe last year, English is widely used in Europe however, in some countries like Italy or Span, and English is not so common used. Sometime when I get lost in the City, we have to ask the local people for the direction. Nevertheless, people on the street and usually busy, only the elderlies were willing to help us. Thus how to conduct a effective communication with the elderlies is our biggest obstacle since them are normal weak in English, some of them even barely know a single word. So we actually use the map as our tool to communicate with the elderly and I try to use English instead of Chinese to communicate with her, this is because English is the more similar language to their language and they may find something, which is common between their language and English. Body language and drawing really help a lot in this conversation and I will always keep smile on my face. The smile is very critical too because most of European think Asian people are always very serious and hard to approach, so a smile actually means we are friendly and we really want your help. At the end of the conversation, I bowed to her for showing our gratitude instead of hugging her. Although hugging is more common in their culture, but as they have the stereotype of Asian people and they will feel comfortable to receive a bow instead of a hug from Asian.