9.6 The Dimensions of Intercultural Communication 数字时代的商务英语写作Competence-1.pdf

Intercultural Communication Competence 9.6 The Dimensions of Intercultural communication competence-1 Hi, there. Welcome back to our course. In previous two sections, we talked about the components of intercultural communication competence. Here comes the question. How do the components work effectively and gain the best result of actual communication? Intercultural scholars have done many theoretical analyses on that and finally proposed some dimensions of intercultural communication competence. According to them, intercultural communication competence is the potential outcome of four interrelated dimensions, the knowledge dimension, the affective dimension, the psychomotor dimension and the situational features dimension. 1. The Knowledge Dimension The knowledge dimension concerns how much you know about your own culture and your interlocutor ’s culture. If you have knowledge about other cultures, you are more likely to be successful in intercultural communication. In order to be culturally knowledgeable, you should at least understand some of your interlocutor ’s dominant cultural values and beliefs. Additionally, you should know whether the person is from an individualistic or collectivistic, high-context or low-context, high or low power distance, or high-uncertainty-avoidance or low-uncertainty-avoidance culture. This dimension also clarifies cognitive simplicity and rigidity and ethnocentrism as barriers. Cognitive simplicity and rigidity refers to the extent to which individuals process information about persons from different cultures simplistically and rigidly. The typical practice of this process is that one group should accept and use the cultural system of another. The person with a simple and rigid system would not be