Creative Course Design: A Syllabus for Teaching Cross-Cultural Communication

Writer(s): 
Steven L. Rosen, Hiroshima Women's University

Interacting with people from other cultures can be stressful, as well as rewarding, for all of us. To inaugurate this column, Steven L. Rosen describes a course designed to reduce the stress and increase the rewards for Japanese college students in a Study Abroad program in the UK. He advocates a flexible, yet strong, sense of self and sensitivity toward the cultures of others. His syllabus employs an anthropological approach to achieve these objectives.

In the spring of 1995 I was invited to go to England as a research fellow in order to design and teach courses in cross-cultural communication at Gyosei International College, a Japanese college in the UK. The president of the college had decided that since many of the freshmen were experiencing severe adjustment problems, so-called "culture shock," the best solution would be to have a required course in cross-cultural communication (CCC). Following Ministry of Education guidelines, other Japanese colleges and graduate schools, in and outside Japan, are also beginning to offer courses in cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural studies.

A report on this pilot course, which in the end proved to be a success, should be of interest to other pioneers in this relatively new field. The syllabus included below, and the accompanying selected bibliography should be useful for anyone intending to design or teach CCC in the future.

The Course

Generally speaking, research in the field of crosscultural communication seems to have taken one of three approaches: 1)linguistic, 2) anthropological, and 3) psychological. A linguistic approach naturally looks at communication as a rule governed process of signification. An anthropological approach would focus less on language structures and more on cultural meanings; viewing communication as the expression of cultural ideologies, cosmologies, or world views. The psychological perspective, which usually adopts a cognitivist orientation, is concerned with showing how perceptual schemata frame our experience of the world and our transactions with it, and how this relates to particular emotional needs and personality orientations. While the syllabus used in our course tried to present all three perspectives, the anthropological approach was most heavily favored.
It was assumed from the start that the best way to help students deal with culture shock and overcome cross-cultural communication problems was not so much by providing them with a fixed set of rules or strategies for communication (the linguistic perspective), nor by examining supposedly fixed mental templates for understanding reality (the psychological perspective); rather we tried to sensitize students as to how humans continually invent and reinvent both themselves and culture through certain core symbols, which articulate such things as cosmologies (world views), epistemologies (ways of thinking and understanding), and ideologies (moral values, political orientations).

This first term required course (enrollment 80) was taught by a team of three instructors: 1) a British instructor who was also a hall warden and the liaison between the college and Reading University, 2) the Japanese president of the college, and 3) myself, an American trained as a cultural anthropologist with eight years teaching experience in Japan. British, Japanese and American culture were the three main culture areas examined for comparative purposes; other EC countries were also touched upon because of the interesting intercultural communication problems being posed by the EC unification process.

The student body was extremely diverse, with a wide range of motivations and English language abilities (which proved to be our biggest challenge). Whereas some students had chosen the school because they couldn't get into a Japanese school of sufficiently high level, others were attaining 500 or higher on the TOEFL and were intending to do graduate work in the U.K.!

The particular emphasis on helping the students overcome culture shock proved to keep interest high regardless of level; students eagerly looked forward to the class because they found that, unlike most of their other classes, the course specifically addressed the emotional and intellectual issues which they were facing. This is not to say that the course became a kind of mass group therapy, but rather that theory was introduced in such a way that it could be seen to be directly relevant to their own personal life experience; the experience of confronting another culture and trying to communicate within it.

The introductory lecture attempted to set the tone by discussing the concrete aims of the course, which were two-fold: first, to familiarize the student with the practical problems of intercultural communication, and secondly, to think about these practical problems as rooted in deeper cultural concerns. The instructors felt that class participation was vital to such a course and worried from the beginning that the large size of the class would preclude this participation. We partly overcame this problem by requiring students to bring in written questions for the instructors, either in English or Japanese. Weekly hand-outs to supplement the syllabus plus overhead projector visuals proved to be an invaluable way to give the students a sense of the organization and direction of the course.

The material on American culture was part of the syllabus for a variety of reasons. One was that the main lecturer, this writer, was and still is American. Another was that most students had had more exposure to American culture than British, and this made it easier to show connections between behavior and culture. A third reason, and one which the other two (non-American) instructors felt to be salient, was that America is an important country economically and geopolitically, and many students, especially in the business course, expected to be dealing with that country across the Atlantic.

The material on British culture was acutely focused on actual communication problems which Japanese students, living in British resident halls, were facing. The British instructor was in charge of the residence halls and knew first hand of the intercultural communication problems which the students were facing with British students. The on-going intercultural tensions in the residence halls between the Japanese and the British students were often the result of breakdowns in communication; the instructor tried to show how cultural misunderstandings (on both sides) were responsible. The Japanese professor provided support, including translation help throughout most of the course. When it came time to lecture on Japanese culture, he graciously deferred to me, since the students were eager to hear about their culture from a non-Japanese who had lived in Japan long enough to become partly Japanized. Students said they found these lectures on their own culture the most interesting because it enabled them to think about many things they had taken for granted in a totally new light.

The 10 week first term course was, by all accounts, a success. Many students reported to me or to their tutors that the course helped them deal with culture shock. It did this by giving them concrete, factual information which helped them deal with cultural adjustment, and also by showing them new ways of looking at intercultural interaction so as to make it less problematic. The aim of the syllabus was to open up the students' minds; to put their own cultural ways of knowing in broad perspective to show that, rather than being fixed models of reality, one's culture is simply one of many possible ways of being in the world.

Conclusion

What does a person need to know in order to engage in communication with those from different cultures? Any course in CCC should be required to address this question. This syllabus attempted to address the question in the particular context of helping Japanese students overcome adjustment problems living in Britain. Whether or not this syllabus would be just as effective in other educational contexts is hard to predict, yet, since it was reportedly the most popular first year course offered, one might assume that much of its content and overall orientation would be of use for other instructors of CCC. As for the mastering of pragmatic rules of intercultural conversation (e.g., things like turn taking, apologies, requests, and so on), the regular English language course seemed to be handling that end of things quite well. It seemed quite obvious to the instructors that the success of the CCC course was primarily due to the fact that we were concerned with showing how communication reiterates culture, and how culture totally relies on communication in order to perpetuate itself.

Syllabus for First Year Required Course in Cross-cultural Communication

Instructors: Professors Rosen, Barrow, Moro'oka

Course Description

The world is inhabited by people with different cultures, which means different values, ways of thinking, patterns of behavior, and so forth. Rather than trying to teach specific rules or strategies for intercultural communication, the aim of this course is to enable students to better understand both their own cultural patterns of behavior as well as those of people from different cultures. It differs from a course in cultural anthropology in so far as we will lay special emphasis on how these differing cultural meanings lead to culture conflict and cross-cultural communication problems. It is hoped that this will help students understand their own communication problems so that they will be in a better position to find solutions to these problems.

This is a ten week one term course required of all first year students. There are three instructors, one American, one British, and one Japanese. The instructors will present perspectives on communication from their own cultures as well as their experiences in intercultural communication.

Method of instruction

The three lecturers--from Britain, Japan and the United States--will teach as a team. All three will be available for private consultation after class for those students with questions or comments. Flip charts and the OHP will be used to help students understand lecturers in English; the Japanese instructor will provide simultaneous translations on the flip chart of difficult terms. Students will be asked to bring in written questions or comments each week, which are based on the previous week's lecture. There is no set text for this course; printed materials handed out to the students each week which will include an outline of the day's lecture.
Course Content (by week)

  • Week 1: Introduction. Statement of the aim of the course: to sensitize students to how culture and communication are integrally related. Introduction of the topics to be covered: British, American, Japanese and other country's patterns of culture; culture shock, and communication problems which arise primarily because of cultural differences.
  • Week 2: Introduction to American culture; a look at how social issues facing the United States (racism, divorce, education) reflect underlying cultural meanings.
  • Week 3: Introduction to British culture with special focus on education. British university student life. British perceptions of foreigners, especially the Japanese.
  • Week 4: Culture shock. Typical symptoms and why they generally occur. Responses such as disgust with the alien culture, or disgust with one's own culture; "going native." How one may begin to deal with this problem through understanding.
  • Week 5: Comparison of Japanese and American cultures. Three main areas of focus: 1) language and communication, 2) school life, 3) conflict resolution.
  • Week 6: Non-verbal or paralinguistic features of communication with special attention to British and Japanese face-to-face interactions.
  • Week 7: The European Economic Community and cross-cultural communication problems which relate to the unification process.
  • Week 8: Ethnocentrism vs. cultural relativism. How to understand other cultures and communication without imperialistic bias. How living in a foreign country and being open to a another way of life and thinking is liable to affect one's personality, hopefully in the direction of greater growth, sensitivity, holism and awareness.
  • Week 9: General review of main topics covered. Questions and answers. Personal experiences/ anecdotes of cross-cultural communication problems. For those students not happy with foreign life (who are homesick), suggestions for how to reach some rapprochement with the alien culture. Homesickness as a kind of idealization in response to new stresses.
  • Week 10: Examination.

Assessment

Short regular quizzes to evaluate the student's level of understanding. One short essay. One final exam worth about 80% of the course grade. Students who regularly contribute will be given extra credit.