Intercultural Communication: Addressing Barriers and Strategies Essay

This essay delves into the critical importance of intercultural communication in today's multicultural world. It highlights how effective intercultural communication facilitates connections, fosters creativity, and enables the exchange of values, beliefs, and customs. The essay identifies several barriers to effective intercultural communication, including ethnocentrism, anxiety, prejudice, and language barriers. It then outlines strategies to overcome these barriers, such as promoting respect, providing cultural knowledge, addressing irrational judgments, and employing language specialists or training programs. The essay concludes by emphasizing the necessity of intercultural communication in a diverse world and the importance of implementing strategies to improve communication and understanding. The essay references several academic sources to support its arguments.

RUNNING HEAD: INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION 0
2020
Multicultural Communication
Student’s Details-

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Importance of Intercultural Communication, its Barriers and
Strategies to address them
Intercultural communication is regarded as discipline that will determine the
communication between the several cultures and social groups. Also, this describes the range
of communication processes that can arise in the social context (Piller, 2017). Here, the essay
has discussed the necessity of intercultural communication into the multicultural world. Also,
the essay has discussed the barriers to the intercultural communication and strategies to
address them.
Intercultural communication is seen as the crucial in the multicultural world in which
it allows the ability to deal with across the cultures in an effective way. It allows the people to
make different connections with the people and also making the mind more creative and
innovative. As intercultural communication is more of an exchange of values, beliefs and
customs of the person, it is considered important aspect in the multicultural world (Holliday,
2018). Further, intercultural communication helps in the transferring of the required
knowledge and the information which is gives value to the organization. This also helps in
maintaining the cultural competence and addressing of the functions across different cultures
and also helps in making positive interactions with others and getting knowledge of the
cultural differences.
There are certain barriers in the effective intercultural communication which can
hinder the capabilities of the person. This can include the ethnocentrism in which
intercultural interaction is affected by the individual’s beliefs and values for one culture being
superior to the other culture. These high or low culture affect the interactions and thereby a
barrier into the communication. Further, anxiety is another barrier in the communication in
which due to the lack of knowledge of different cultures and is a major issue in the
intercultural interaction. Also, the individuals can make the irrational judgements about
different cultures which can be the barriers for the intercultural communication due to
prejudice (Philip, Manias, & Woodward‐Kron, 2015). Furthermore, there are language
barriers which can be the hurdle in the exchange of the value, ideas and the values and beliefs
during the communication process.
There are strategies for overcoming the barriers of effective intercultural
communication. Firstly, people should create the tendency to respect each other which can

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reduce the ethnocentrism within the people. Also, the person should be given knowledge
about the culture which can reduce the anxiety and will make the communication process
effective. Also, the gaps or the irrational judgements should be removed within the workplace
through the development of cooperation within the people (Calafell, et al., 2017). Further,
people can remove their language barriers through the employment of a specialists or running
a training program for improving the language efficiencies. All these altogether can reduce
the barriers in intercultural communication.
To conclude, it can be said that intercultural communication is necessary into the
multicultural world as it can bring the new perspective and often can add to the knowledge of
the people. Moreover, the barriers can in effective intercultural communication can be
removed through proper strategies for the improvement in the communication.

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References
Calafell, B., Chuang, S., Cooks, L., Cramer, L., Harris, T., González, A., & Lescure, R.
(2017). Critical intercultural communication pedagogy. Lexington Books.
Holliday, A. (2018). Understanding intercultural communication: Negotiating a grammar of
culture. Routlegde.
Philip, S., Manias, E., & Woodward‐Kron, R. (2015). Nursing educator perspectives of
overseas qualified nurses' intercultural clinical communication: barriers, enablers and
engagement strategies. Journal of clinical nursing, 24(17-18), 2628-2637.
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural communication: A critical introduction. Edinburgh University
Press.