International and Intercultural Communication Commons^™

Archaeologists As Activists - M. Jay Stottman, Curtis Hutt

International Dialogue

Archaeologists as Activists: Can Archaeologists Change the World? is comprised of papers edited by M. Jay Stottman—many of which were initially prepared for a session at the 2004 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in St. Louis. The focus of this volume is “activist archaeology” as theorized and performed by archaeologists working in the last few decades in the United States. While the specific topics addressed are quite local, the questions raised and practices deployed are highly significant for archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians engaged in international settings. First, I must make a few disclaimers. This reviewer is neither …

Chinese Culture And Casino Customer Service, Qing Han

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With the tightened competitive conditions in the gaming industry, it is essential for casino management to focus on customer service. Chinese customers are very important for the Las Vegas gaming market. Even though the games offered by the casinos are the core value that Chinese customers seek when visiting a casino, a warm, comfortable and intimate service will enhance their gaming experience as well. Understanding important Chinese culture factors such as superstitions, gaming characteristics and communication styles can help casino employees enhance the quality of the service they are able to offer to Chinese customers, thereby increasing satisfaction and retention.

Negotiating Tensions Across Organizational Boundaries: Communication And Refugee Resettlement Organizations, Sarah Steimel

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Voluntary non-profit organizations play a critical role in mediating the transition of refugees into their new host communities in the United States. Furthermore, mediation is fundamentally a communicative phenomenon, as social services are provided in through communication between nonprofit workers and clients. Critically, for voluntary mediating organizations to create empowering spaces for refugees, communication is central. In this study, I emphasize the tensional processes inherent to mediating interactions and explore how refugee resettlement organizational staff members and refugee-clients describe and manage the communicative tensions which emerge when they interact with one another.

I conducted eighteen in-depth interviews with fifteen organizational …

Conversation Strategies: Preparing Learners For Real-World Interaction, Angela Richardson

Sandanona

Workshop/Demonstration

Conversation strategies play an important role in successful communication and socialization, yet they are not often explicitly taught in language classrooms. In this workshop/demonstration we will explore how to use conversation strategies as a means for building both confidence and fluency, while also preparing students for real-world interactions.

The Performance Of Intercultural Communication: China's "New Face" And The 2008 Beijing Olympics, Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores Chinese communication practices. I focus on the performance of intercultural communication and how the "New Face" of China was performed to the world and in day-to-day intercultural communication encounters during the 2008 Olympics. I analyze the Olympic Volunteer Training Manual as performative text as well as interviewed Beijing Olympic volunteers about their encounters with international visitors. Specifically, I discuss why the Olympics were a crucial moment for China to unveil its "New Face" to the world, what the "New Face" of China entails, and the reasons why China is in need of a new image on the …

Experiences With Peace Corps’ Third Goal: Perspectives Of Peace Corps Mali Volunteers, Elizabeth N. Gardiner

Capstone Collection

When asked what the best part of their service was, the large majority of Peace Corps Volunteers will light up as they describe a cross-cultural experience or relationship. Peace Corps Volunteers want to share these sentiments with Americans. I conducted a qualitative case study by interviewing three fellow Peace Corps Volunteers and evaluating 35 survey responses, in order to explore Peace Corps Volunteers’ perceptions of Peace Corps’ Third Goal- to share a host country culture with Americans. The interviews were transcribed and then compared and contrasted. From the interviews and survey findings, it has been found that the Peace Corps …

Arabic Diglossia And Arabic As A Foregn Language: The Perception Of Students In World Learning Oman Center, Hilal Al-Mamari

Capstone Collection

The principle objective of this independent inquiry is to address the research question: what are the impacts of Arabic Diglossia, if any, on the experience of learners of Arabic as a foreign language? The study attempts to answer this question through the perception of a sample group of 23 learners studying Arabic as a foreign language in World Learning Oman Center in semester of Spring 2011.

Diglossia is defined by linguists as a sociolinguistic phenomenon in which a particular language has two varieties, one of which is considered High and more standard and used in exclusive domains, while the other …

E-Mail Management Of Japanese Hotels In Comparison With South Korean Hotels, Kyoko Morikoshi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There has been little study done concerning the service quality of Japanese hotels toward foreign guests; especially e-mail management in English has not been analyzed in Japan before. Since e-mail inquiries in English from foreign guests could be the first step for Japanese hotels to provide good service to prospective guests, managing English e-mails efficiently is a key to attracting more foreign guests. Therefore this study examined the actual condition of e-mail management at Japanese hotels by sending an English inquiry to them. Korean hotels were also included because South Korea and Japan have similar linguistic and economic backgrounds. A …

Norcal Vs. Socal: Culture As Communication, Jillian J. Smith

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Language Contact Between Korean And English In Online Communication, Jiyoung L. Daniel

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

Over the past decade, the use of the Internet has become an indispensable part of life in the new millennium. One of the most popular activities in the era of the Internet is online communication. Net-Lingo, which is a product of online communication, is a new language variety that differs from both writing and speech as traditionally understood (Crystal, 2001). Given that Net-Lingo is considered a language variety, I describe the salient linguistic characteristics of Korean Net-Lingo (KNL) and investigate the specific mechanisms that govern the observable linguistic characteristics. The globalization of the Internet is prompting different languages to come …

Student Lunch Nutrition, Kathryn Leigh Scholte

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Social Media: The Use Of Facebook And Twitter To Impact Political Unrest In The Middle East Through The Power Of Collaboration, Sarah Danielle Goodman

Journalism

The power of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are often overlooked and unaccounted for.  The revolutionary and unprecedented political changes in the Middle East have changed the way the world uses and now views these platforms.   This study addresses the transformation of both the Middle East and social media, alongside each other.  In addition, it discusses how young activists utilized these tools in order to unite and therefore produce radical alteration of Middle Eastern governments, what these governments did in an attempt to preserve control and how the United States got involved.

Communicative Language Teaching In Current Chinese Colleges And Universities., Xiaorong Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been prioritized as the key instructional approach in colleges since the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a revised syllabus in 1999 that underlines college EFL students' communicative competence. The issuance of the syllabus was followed by a series of reforms on curricular designs and teaching methods. However, CLT has encountered great resistance. College teachers and learners are constrained by socio-cultural influences such as the perceptions of teachers' roles and ways of learning and teaching (Hu, 2002; Rao, 1996). Although some teachers have shown positive attitudes towards CLT, in general they have failed to practice it …

The Impact Of New Social Media On Intercultural Adaptation, Rebecca Sawyer

Senior Honors Projects

New social media have become increasingly popular components of our everyday lives in today’s globalizing society.  They provide a context where people across the world can communicate, exchange messages, share knowledge, and interact with each other regardless of the distance that separates them.  Intercultural adaptation involves the process of promoting understanding through interaction to increase the level of fitness so that the demands of a new cultural environment can be met.  Social media and intercultural adaptation are two concepts that have become prominent in our current society.

Research shows that people tend to use new social media to become more …

The Cnn Effect: Mass Media And Humanitarian Aid, Jared R. Bredeson

Senior Honors Theses

Mass media have great power and great responsibility. The CNN Effect states that when news media broadcast emotionally driven stories of human crisis, this provokes a major response by domestic audiences and political elites. This power to influence public policy can help save people from danger and even death. Acts of massive genocide were committed in Rwanda and Darfur. Because the media failed to act quickly and report accurately on these situations, many people lost their lives due to slow international reaction. News media need to learn from these tragic mistakes and never let genocide go on unnoticed by those …

#Reformjo: Jordanian Tweets For Social Reform, Megan Daily

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

What can be said in 140 characters or less? During what has been dubbed the “Arab Spring”, Twitter has been heralded as the catalyst that sparked revolutions. Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and others have utilized this microblogging site to express opinions, share links, and inform the world what is happening. In the past few months, the number of Jordanians on Twitter has risen sharply. During the course of my research, I aimed to discover if there were “elite users”, people whose opinions had more weight or significance in this dialogue as the Twitter community tends to develop with a distinct …

Media In Sāmoa: Journalists‟ Realities, Regional Initiatives, And Visions For The Future, Leslie Pyne

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research investigates media freedom in Sāmoa by identifying the country‟s obstacles to freedom of expression and proposing strategies for generating change in the media industry. The paper assesses the local media initiatives of the Journalists Association of (Western) Sāmoa (JAWS), Sāmoa Observer newspaper, United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the Media and Journalism Programme at the National University of Sāmoa (NUS), and evaluates their strengths and shortcomings in providing services for the community. It also examines how journalists balance cultural sensitivity in reporting and what ideas news organizations, journalists, journalism students, and media educators have for …

Crosstalk 2.0: Asylum And Communicative Breakdowns, Marco Jacquemet

Communication Studies

Using ethnographic evidence on asylum proceedings for refugee recognition from various sources (Italy, Belgium, United Kingdom, and Canada), this paper updates Gumperz’s notion of crosstalk by exploring the massively flexible and multilingual nature of late-modern communication as epitomized in one of the most complex adjudication procedures performed by Western nation-states. Every year thousands of displaced people seek the protection of various European countries by filing asylum claims, which are examined by national commissions. This paper explores how the problematic nature of these encounters can be traced to the nature of late-modern communication, characterized as it is by asymmetrical power, multiple …

An Evaluation Of The California Brief Multicultural Competence Scale And Training For Mental Health Practices, Catherine Tillie Smith, Dahlia Avila

Theses Digitization Project

This study was designed to investigate the effectiveness of the California Brief Multicultural Competence Scale (CBMCS) and training as a tool to increase cultural competency skills. The interest of this was to determine if the training brought about a change in empathy or effectively increased knowledge about the importance of culture.

Communication In Intercultural Marriages: Managing Cultural Differences And Conflict For Marital Satisfaction, Tiffany G. Renalds

Masters Theses

This qualitative study investigated the phenomenon of intercultural marriages, particularly the unique internal and external elements that impact communication and conflict within intercultural marriages of varying lengths and the intercultural communication competencies utilized by spouses in intercultural marriages. The research focused on three questions: (1) Which internal and external factors impact the effectiveness of communication between spouses in intercultural marriages the most? (2) Which communication competencies do spouses in intercultural marriages develop in order to address cross-cultural differences? (3) How do spouses in intercultural marriages experience and deal with conflict within their intercultural marriages? Data was obtained employing semi-structured interviews. …

International Graduate Student Powerpoint Presentation Designs: A Reality Check, Alla Zareva

English Faculty Publications

The present study set out to examine what novice international graduate student presenters consider to be effective PowerPoint slide design practices and the extent to which these practices are in agreement with experts’ advice. The analysis focused on three main features of students’ PowerPoint presentations – organisation, style and typography. The general conclusion is that we can mostly rely on students’ intuitions concerning ‘relevance’ and ‘simplicity’ of PowerPoint presentation designs, but we should draw their attention to ‘consistency’, i.e., the systematic application of the organisation, style and typological features to their PowerPoint presentations.

The 2008 Us Presidential Campaign As Represented In The Online Edition Of The Korea Times, Sherri L. Ter Molen

Communication Faculty Research Publications

Because public opinion has been found to influence government policy (Page & Shapiro, 1983, p. 185) and because media are cultural products that “mirror society” and “contribute to the reconstruction of the culture” (Czarniawska, 2006, p. 250), I conducted a rhetorical analysis of the coverage of the 2008 US presidential campaign in the online edition of the English language newspaper, The Korea Times. Using Entman’s (2007) concept of framing bias in the media as a means to influence the distribution of power, I found that The Korea Times used the deictic expression ‘we’ to express and (re)construct nationalistic views of …

Developing Global Literacy: Best Practices For Teaching Technical Communication Internationally, Melanie I. Cashin

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The teaching of technical communication has been expanding beyond English-speaking borders for several decades. U.S. educators often teach technical communication internationally through workshops, faculty exchanges, and e-collaborations. This paper discusses challenges, solutions, and best practices for U.S. educators teaching internationally, especially those teaching in China. By understanding current theory and practice in international technical communication education, learning from the missteps and successes of their colleagues, and incorporating globally appropriate recommendations into their classrooms, U.S. educators will be better prepared to deliver instruction abroad and develop mutually beneficial collaborations across cultures.

The Need For Foreign Correspondents: A Cost Benefit Analysis, Haley Petersen

Journalism

This paper includes an examination of the decline in foreign news coverage, the factors contributing to the decline, the implications of decreased coverage in a democratic society, the market for international news, and an explanation of various models of foreign correspondence in relation to the quality of work produced contrasted against the cost of production.

A Comparison Of Leadership Traits Across Countries: Taiwan And United States, Chi-Shou Justin Yang

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

With the rise of new technologies, geographical and political boundaries between companies are disappearing. Managers within multinational organizations are faced with the challenge of adapting to new paradigms of leadership while leading employees who may share different backgrounds. With businesses becoming more globalized, it is important to know and understand how to lead and interact with people from other cultures. The purpose of the study is to explore and describe similarities or differences with managers from the United States and managers from Taiwan in relation to the 29 leadership traits overall as well as at individual management levels. As a …

Reform Of The United Nations Security Council: A Rope Of Sand, Alice Minor

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

For nearly two decades the international community has debated how to address reform of the United Nations Security Council. Many argue that it is imperative that the United Nations Security Council be reformed for the body to maintain its relevance and legitimacy in the Twenty-first Century. The original United Nations Charter endowed special voting privileges and permanent membership to the five powers that emerged victorious from World War Two. These five powers no longer describe the international world order. Various reform groups such as the Group of Four, The United for Consensus movement, and the Africa Group have proposed reform …

El Camino Largo De Integración Regional De Defensa Y Seguridad: Desafíos Y Potencialidades Del Consejo De Defensa Suramericano, William Heegaard

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The South American Defense Council (SDC) represents the most recent step taken along a long road of multilateral and bilateral defense agreements echoing Bolivar’s dream of continental defense integration. Before the Second World War, the continent developed a deep base of collective security agreements that eventually formed the OAS. However, during the Cold War, the U.S. replaced collective security with the doctrine of national security. U.S. unilateral policies prevented the possibility of continental cooperation on defense. In the vacuum, new alliances and agreements were made at sub-regional and bilateral levels. With the end of the Cold War, a new …

Intercultural Communication: Its Importance To Various Career Fields And Perspective By Various Authors, Priscilla N. Gitimu

Online Journal for Workforce Education and Development

Globalization has made intercultural communication inevitable. Communicating with other cultures characterizes today’s business, classroom, and community. Technology especially the internet has increased the probability that whatever is documented online will be read by someone from another culture. Intercultural communication is of importance in any career field thus the art of knowing how to communicate with other cultures should be a work place skill that is emphasized. This is a conceptual paper whose purpose is two fold. First the paper gives a synopsis of the importance of efficient and competent intercultural communication in various career fields; namely, education, business, medicine and …

Multicultural Competence: Exploring And Monitoring Its Development, Alvino Fantini Phd, Professor Emeritus

Fostering Multicultural Competence and Global Justice: an SIT Symposium

Educators engaged in international, intercultural educational programs are responsible for maximizing the benefits of these experiences for participants. This requires a clear focus on the development of multicultural (or intercultural) competencies (MCC) in participants if students are to deal effectively and appropriately across cultures.

This session explores the development and assessment of MCC abilities. It is based on findings from an international research effort that examined a comprehensive construct of MCC, developed a tool for its assessment, and identified intercultural outcomes in participants as well as their hosts engaged in an intercultural exchange.

The session also explores the nature of …

New Lines Of Inquiry: Arts-Based Research For Bridging Cultures, Sarah Brock Ma, Academic Director

Fostering Multicultural Competence and Global Justice: an SIT Symposium

This paper explores the implications for arts-based research (ABR) methods in fostering cross-cultural dialogue in international study. It reviews the academic arguments for and against the use of arts-based methodologies in qualitative research where more traditional, methodologies in the social sciences are combined with creative inquiry – narrative, poetic, dance, and visual forms of inquiry, for example – as well as the technical challenges and benefits associated with drawing on the humanities and arts as primary modes of inquiry; it explores the relevance and potential for ABR within the broader context of the study and use of the arts and …