Communication and Semiotics Essay

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Communication and Scholarship
CMS1000

Student Name: | | Course Names: | Communication and Scholarship | Course Number | | Student Number: | | Assignment 1: | Essay 3 | Lecturer: | | Due Date: | 18 October 2010 extension provided 25 October 2010 | Topic 3: | An awareness of the different cultural contexts of nonverbal communication is essential to effective communication in a professional setting. Do you agree/disagree? |

Nonverbal communication can be defined as the method of communicating with an individual or individual’s without the use of verbal communication. Nonverbal communication also is bound to culture. Particularly, there is disparity amid cultures and nationalities concerning the comparative significance of discourse opposed to silence, the comparative importance of negotiation opposed to action. Because of these diversities, an awareness of the different cultural contexts of nonverbal communication is essential to effective communication in a professional setting. This essay will deliberate how an awareness of kinesics can help to prevent breaches of protocol in a cross-cultural professional setting. It will then go on to examine proxemics and how they can be misinterpreted in a professional context unless there is an understanding of cultural nuances. How an understanding of chronemics can facilitate in the prevention of potential conflicts within a professional cross-cultural environment and how an appreciation and knowledge of the importance of semiotics will significantly reduce potential barriers and contradictions within a cross-cultural professional frameworks, will also be examined. An awareness of kinesics can help to prevent breaches of protocol in a cross-cultural professional setting. Kinesics is simply described as “body language” or physical movements (Tyler, Kossen, & Ryan, 1999, p. 282). ‘The importance of body language leads to the fact that a person cannot not communicate’ (Bolton, 1987, p. 78). This pertains to established ideologies of the whole body or to individual components, in particular the face, hands and arms. Additionally, it considers posture in regards to standing and sitting, likewise with eyes and facial expressions as described by, for instance the arching of eyebrows or rolling of the eyes (Terry Mohan, 2004 & Archee, 2004, p. 70). Kinesics differs culturally and can have a significant impression in cross-cultural contexts as discussed (CMS1000, 2004, p. 9). For example, an individual of a differing culture may use large hand movements and body gestures as an expression of passion or anger, while another individual of another culture perhaps appears evidently less animated, however possibly no less irate. Kinesics also includes the use of smiling, grimacing, sniggering excreta. While collectively, smiling depicts happiness, in various cultures it also is used as a pretense to repress sorrow or to conceal embarrassment. To be a good reader of body language requires that you sharpen your powers of observation and perception. A consciousness of the relationship between culture and nonverbal communication as well as an appreciation of the distinctions between cultures is beneficial—and at times crucial—in communicating successfully. Education and understanding are interrelated (Marx, 2001, p. 46). To explain culture in a simplistic way and its relationship to nonverbal communication is to say that people are diverse—we live, work, and play in distinctive circles, settings, and environment, and we adjust to these in contrasting ways. Through education, an individual grows better informed. In other words, an individual is better equipped and recognises what to look for; consequently, an individual is more likely to examine and decode productively. Whilst an understanding of communication techniques is imperative, it is essential that the encoder is receptive to the human
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