Communicating and Training Across Cultures

It is always a challenge to cross into another culture and to attempt to communicate with someone who has grown up with different experiences and been raised to see life from a different perspective. This challenge is compounded when one enters an intercultural situation that involves teaching and training. It is essential for those who are together in a training environment to have good communication. Bad communication, or lack of communication, undermines the potential of successful training. Therefore, learning good intercultural communciation is essential for those who will be involved in cross-cultural training.

One of the most important issues in intercultural communication is readiness to be adaptable, to deal in an accommodating way with the challenges that one will face. In an intercultural context more than in any other situation, both the teacher and the learner must be prepared to face differences of opinion, differences of technique and differences of worldview. It is encouraging to note that, according to studies, entering into an intercultural situation can actually be a catalyst that causes an individual to be more "learning-prone." One researcher, Tough, did a study on people crossing cultures and concluded that "…life transitions or the anticipation of them accounted for the initiation of…learning projects." (Cross 1981:95) For many people, therefore, it seems that an intercultural context is a natural encouragement to the people involved to be adaptable and ready to learn new things and new ways of doing thing.