CROSS-CULTURE COMMUNICATION

Cross-Culture Communication

Cross-Culture Communication

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to enlighten the concept of cross-culture communication. The paper aims to explore comparison between the way Africans view education in the West and the way it is perceived by the African Americans. In addition, the paper will also contrast the perception of Africans from African American from the perspective of employment. In addition, the paper will discuss different forms of communication, and discuss the theories proposed by E.T Hall. In 2001, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left behind Act (NCLB), a law meant to improve the performance of the nation's elementary and high schools. Based on the idea that setting high expectations and goals will lead to success for all students, NCLB has increased national education standards for states, local school districts, and individual schools, and it promotes a greater emphasis on reading. It has also attempted to give parents of all races more ability to choose which schools their children will attend.

As a rule, Africans are multilingual, speaking a maternal language as a first language and one or more other languages for specific purposes in society. Today there are more than 2,000 African languages spoken on the continent, plus the European languages that are holdovers from the colonial era. During the colonial period European language and governmental systems supplanted or limited those of the indigenous Africans. As a result European languages, the language of the colonizers, became the official languages of most modern-day African countries. North Africa was an exception, however. Arabic, with its long tradition of literacy and its intimate association with Islam, persisted through the colonial period to become the official language at independence. Even in the north, however, fluency in European languages was widespread. In Egypt, for example, English was—and still is—widely spoken.

Intercultural communication is a complex phenomenon in which different factors interact with nature; therefore, their study demands interdisciplinary approaches and reductionism. The cross-cultural communication not only possesses utmost importance in the corporate world; but, it is of utmost importance in the field of education. The era of globalization has enhanced the competition, and an organization needs to work across national boundaries in order to achieve competitive edge over global rivalry. The only issue here is the communication gap that exists between the employees that correspond to diverse cultures. Therefore, the organizations must formulate effective strategies in order to discover diverse communication sources to avoid the cross-cultural communication gap in the organization (Hall, 1976).

Education: Comparison between the Perception of Africans and African Americans

Particularly in America's inner cities, elementary and high school classes often include students from households with just one parent, or in poverty, or where English is spoken as a second language or not at all. Traditionally, students who fall into one or more of these categories are labeled "at risk." Since the 1960s, a so-called compensatory education movement has worked to provide at-risk students with extra help to "compensate" for these disadvantages (Atwater et ...