Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Here is my speech for tomorrow's class:
Intercultural Communication and Emotional Intelligence
In this presentation I would like to talk about the concepts of intercultural communication and emotional intelligence, drawing from my own experiences and observations from living in a culture different from my own and forming an understanding of the meaning of emotional intelligence. The issue that I want to explore with you may seem a little controversial and less than politically correct, however I will also argue that it is worth consideration nonetheless.
There was a passage in our reading brick which read like this: “women tend to be more finely attuned to non-verbal cues, as are those with high Emotional Intelligence. Similarly, many eastern cultures rely heavily on non-verbal cues.” According to deductive reasoning: Premise A is that people with high emotional intelligence are more finely attuned to non-verbal cues. Premise B is that Eastern cultures rely heavily on non-verbal cues. So can we deduce that people from eastern cultures therefore have higher emotional intelligence?
Countries of this region would be China, Taiwan , Korea, and Japan. After my experiences studying and working in Taiwan, I learnt a lot not only about intercultural communication but also about Chinese culture itself – many would agree that in Chinese culture a lot of importance is placed on Face, which is generally speaking a consideration of personal dignity and self-respect. Saving Face, for example, requires one’s feelings to be considered and respected in day to day interactions. While I became more adept at communicating smoothly and effectively with those from a different culture, I honed my non-verbal communication skills as I gradually realized that body language and paralanguage, which means the meaning which is conveyed by the way something is said as well as what is said, carries more weight. I began to pick up on non-verbal and indirect communication, and after a few misunderstandings, learnt to a certain extent how to adopt indirect communication techniques as well. Friends who had lived in Taiwan for extended periods of time told me that this is what I needed to learn in order to become an efficient cross-cultural communicator. One example of indirect communication I encountered just when everything had started falling into place was:
When I was teaching English in a kindergarten in Taichung, I would spend half an hour in each of three classrooms, hopping from one to the next. It required me to leave the first classroom a couple of minutes before the half-hour mark in order to start the next class exactly on the hour or half-hour. I didn’t do this at first, and arrived a few minutes too late as a habit. Then one day, I noticed the clock in the next classroom had been moved forward by an obvious amount of time, and that when I would look up and be puzzled, the teachers would look at me, then look at the clock, then back at me. If I hadn’t already been living in Taiwan for a year, I would not have noticed these non-verbal cues which form an example of an indirect way of saying, “please start your class on time”. I embarked on further investigation: I asked my 12 –year old private English language student Petunia if she thought the Chinese were less direct than Westerners. I told her about the clock example at the kindergarten. In my next lesson with her, she got back to me with the reply, that that was simply a sign of EQ – emotional intelligence. But alas, I thought, surely there are people in Australia or America or France for example with high emotional intelligence who would simply ask directly? I had stumbled across a little problem evaluating the scope of emotional intelligence – is indirectness a sign of emotional intelligence?
Observations made during my 18-month long sojourn in Taiwan as well as my readings in cross-cultural communication allowed me to form the tentative conclusion that people from Eastern cultures, including Chinese culture, were generally more indirect. As I said earlier, it is controversial to make such a generalization. Is it true? Who can really say? I asked earlier if we can say that indirect communication was a sign of emotional intelligence. According to Slavoney and Mayer, “emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, to integrate, to understand and reflectively manage one’s own and other people’s feelings.” Non-verbal cues and indirect communication, serve to protect the feelings of the receiver of the message, because the message is being conveyed more subtly and gently.
Then I would argue that yes, indirect communication is a form of emotional intelligence. But emotional intelligence generally means being a competent communicator. A culture relying more heavily on non-verbal cues probably just implies that their communication styles are different, rather than better or worse. In fact, my German language teacher told me back in highschool before our class took off to Germany for a cultural exchange, that another culture is never better or worse: Just different. ¶ 22:39
Intercultural Communication and Emotional Intelligence
In this presentation I would like to talk about the concepts of intercultural communication and emotional intelligence, drawing from my own experiences and observations from living in a culture different from my own and forming an understanding of the meaning of emotional intelligence. The issue that I want to explore with you may seem a little controversial and less than politically correct, however I will also argue that it is worth consideration nonetheless.
There was a passage in our reading brick which read like this: “women tend to be more finely attuned to non-verbal cues, as are those with high Emotional Intelligence. Similarly, many eastern cultures rely heavily on non-verbal cues.” According to deductive reasoning: Premise A is that people with high emotional intelligence are more finely attuned to non-verbal cues. Premise B is that Eastern cultures rely heavily on non-verbal cues. So can we deduce that people from eastern cultures therefore have higher emotional intelligence?
Countries of this region would be China, Taiwan , Korea, and Japan. After my experiences studying and working in Taiwan, I learnt a lot not only about intercultural communication but also about Chinese culture itself – many would agree that in Chinese culture a lot of importance is placed on Face, which is generally speaking a consideration of personal dignity and self-respect. Saving Face, for example, requires one’s feelings to be considered and respected in day to day interactions. While I became more adept at communicating smoothly and effectively with those from a different culture, I honed my non-verbal communication skills as I gradually realized that body language and paralanguage, which means the meaning which is conveyed by the way something is said as well as what is said, carries more weight. I began to pick up on non-verbal and indirect communication, and after a few misunderstandings, learnt to a certain extent how to adopt indirect communication techniques as well. Friends who had lived in Taiwan for extended periods of time told me that this is what I needed to learn in order to become an efficient cross-cultural communicator. One example of indirect communication I encountered just when everything had started falling into place was:
When I was teaching English in a kindergarten in Taichung, I would spend half an hour in each of three classrooms, hopping from one to the next. It required me to leave the first classroom a couple of minutes before the half-hour mark in order to start the next class exactly on the hour or half-hour. I didn’t do this at first, and arrived a few minutes too late as a habit. Then one day, I noticed the clock in the next classroom had been moved forward by an obvious amount of time, and that when I would look up and be puzzled, the teachers would look at me, then look at the clock, then back at me. If I hadn’t already been living in Taiwan for a year, I would not have noticed these non-verbal cues which form an example of an indirect way of saying, “please start your class on time”. I embarked on further investigation: I asked my 12 –year old private English language student Petunia if she thought the Chinese were less direct than Westerners. I told her about the clock example at the kindergarten. In my next lesson with her, she got back to me with the reply, that that was simply a sign of EQ – emotional intelligence. But alas, I thought, surely there are people in Australia or America or France for example with high emotional intelligence who would simply ask directly? I had stumbled across a little problem evaluating the scope of emotional intelligence – is indirectness a sign of emotional intelligence?
Observations made during my 18-month long sojourn in Taiwan as well as my readings in cross-cultural communication allowed me to form the tentative conclusion that people from Eastern cultures, including Chinese culture, were generally more indirect. As I said earlier, it is controversial to make such a generalization. Is it true? Who can really say? I asked earlier if we can say that indirect communication was a sign of emotional intelligence. According to Slavoney and Mayer, “emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, to integrate, to understand and reflectively manage one’s own and other people’s feelings.” Non-verbal cues and indirect communication, serve to protect the feelings of the receiver of the message, because the message is being conveyed more subtly and gently.
Then I would argue that yes, indirect communication is a form of emotional intelligence. But emotional intelligence generally means being a competent communicator. A culture relying more heavily on non-verbal cues probably just implies that their communication styles are different, rather than better or worse. In fact, my German language teacher told me back in highschool before our class took off to Germany for a cultural exchange, that another culture is never better or worse: Just different. ¶ 22:39
