Practice Your Skills

Communicators need to use verbal and nonverbal behaviors effectively and appropriately to attain goals and get along in intercultural situations. Sometimes this literally means using the language of another culture well enough to communicate effectively. Sometimes it simply means communicating your interest and appreciation for another person’s life experiences and point of view (Chen & Starosta, 1996). Communicators with fewer social skills have more difficulty managing the “different” interactions that intercultural situations demand, so it is important to develop the following skills (Arasaratnam, 2007).

BACK TO

Glee

image At the beginning of the chapter, we talked about the hit musical comedy television show Glee, which depicted the complexity within and between co-cultures and a satirical take on high school life. Let’s revisit Glee, and see how the show both related to and reflected some of the concepts described in this chapter.