Intercultural vs. Cross-Cultural Communication

1). Intercultural communication focuses on “sharing of meanings” across cultures, whereas cross-cultural communication focuses on comparisons of communication styles. Using a variety of academic sources, evaluate both of these theories to determine which is the most useful for developing effective communication with people from other cultures. You may also draw on personal experience in the development of your argument.

Everyone in this world is in one way or another influenced or affected by culture. We all have different interpretation of one’s culture due to diversification, racial or even physical location. We can come up with various views, perception or image regarding one’s culture just by having a glimpse of that particular person. This in turn will affect the communication between each other creating a positive or a negative image of a particular person. One without the knowledge of intercultural and cross-cultural communication is like an “irregular-shaped ball” – hard to handle and understand while playing with it and thus it will lead to barriers to effective communication. According to Samovar and Porter (1991, p. 10) “intercultural communication occurs whenever a message is produced by a member of one culture for consumption by a member of another culture, a message must be understand”. As a separate notion, it studies situations where people from different cultural backgrounds interact. While on the other hand, cross-cultural communication “is a process of exchanging, negotiating, and mediating one's cultural differences through language, non-verbal gestures, and space relationships” (Clarke and Sanchez, 2001). Having culture as a common shared word, both terms still stands with a different meaning. Whereby, in a nut shell, “intercultural communication involves face-to-face communication between people from different cultures while cross-cultural communication involves comparison of face-to-face communication.” (Gudykunst & Mody, 2002)

Bretag,