States

The United States of America attracts tens of thousands of students from all over the world. There are, approximately, 5,000 four-year colleges and 10,000 community colleges in the United States and almost all of them are playing host to students from all over the world. Students come to the US to study from national cultures as different to each other as that of Indonesia and Ireland, and as different to the American culture as those of the United Arab Emirates and Outer Mongolia. By way of example, consider the languages that can be heard on the campus of one of our local community colleges! Apart from English and Spanish, some of the languages that can be heard at Pepperdine University include Farsi (Iran), Russian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, Tagalong (Philippines), French, Italian, Swedish, German, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, and Hindi. This means that the barrier of learning English so as to communicate with professors and fellow students is one of the first that the new international student must face.

One of the most surprising things that foreign students in America will discover is that after, say, the first year of life as a foreign student in the US that first trip back home is going to be surprising. The country you go back to will not look exactly like the one you left behind when you first packed your bags in a state of high excitement and headed for the airport. Many things that you simply never noticed about your home country will hit you for the first time. For example, the male student from Arabian Gulf countries who was, at first, shocked to see how many American women walk around with their bodies revealed and even partially nude, will come back home to all the robed figures in his native land and really notice them for the first time. The Italian student who never noticed that in his home country people speak with their hands as much as with their lips will get off the plane and walk into the airport, and wonder why it is that everyone is waving their arms at each other. The surprising thing is that when the foreign student goes home for an extended holiday he or she will experience the same emotional roller coaster effect that they experienced the first time they came to America.

There is another aspect of communication, however, that can help the foreign student. This is learning to recognize the non-verbal signals that exist. People communicate, as we know, not only with the spoken language but also with body language. This is sometimes called “kinesics.” What it means is that there are a number of non-verbal clues that we can receive that will guide us about the direction of a conversation even if the words being used are not expressing the same thing as the gesture. One of the best keys to non-verbal communication is eye- contact. All of us have been told that it is important to maintain eye contact during an interview. It is also important; of course, to notice if the person you are speaking to is maintaining eye contact with you. Sometimes a physical gesture like eye contact will go along with what the person you are talking to is saying verbally and sometimes it will contradict this. Sometimes a physical gesture, for example, nodding the head will indicate that it is OK to keep speaking or that the person you are talking to is agreeing with what you are saying. Many forms of non-verbal communication are universal, but no all. It is likely that the smile is a universal non-verbal message. Some kinesic messages are particular to a culture or even to a language group. For example, in Greece people say “No” non-verbally not by moving their head side-to-side as is common in many other countries, but with a sharp upward movement of the head. One of the things that foreign students in America will notice is that, as time goes by, the non-verbal messages of the host country will start to seem natural and that they start to express themselves in the same way. It seems strange to say so, however, it is very likely that the foreign student who catches on to American non-verbal modes of communication and begins to use them is someone whose strange accent will be overlooked by residents of the host country. The really difficult problems of language and culture are not, however, problems of having a strange accent. More challenging is the fact that language gives cultural clues about what has been called the “low context” and the “high context” culture.

Interactions With Americans: The Language Barrier and Non-Verbal Communication

When the foreign student first gets to the United States he or she experiences “euphoria”, that is, an extremely happy state. This is because they finally got there and everything is so exciting. This feeling passes away and then foreign students experience negative feelings about the host country for a while. We can call it “depression” or the feeling that” everything is awful.” When this happens the foreign student can apply o

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