Module 6 Assignment
Instructions
This assignment addresses course outcome 1 and module learning objectives 1 and 2.
You will need to conduct an interview with someone from a different culture and write a brief essay summarizing your interview experience for this assignment. Your essay will need to focus on personal reaction to, and acquired knowledge and analysis of, certain aspects of another culture relevant to effective intercultural communication. The assignment asks you to do the following: 1) learn about, and be aware of, one’s own culture and how it has shaped who and what one is so that honest and sound research of another culture to which she does not belong may occur; 2) interview someone from, or closely associated with, that culture and; 3) write a personal narrative analyzing the aforementioned process and the intercultural communication/interviewing experience arising from prior research, the process of the intercultural interview, and the connection made through the intercultural interview with a person of a different culture.
Additional Instructions
First and foremost, an intercultural interview should be conducted in a safe environment enabling both interviewer and interviewee to ask genuine, honest, and respectful questions with like tenored responses given. The interview, though, must be more than a loose exercise in stream-of-consciousness questioning. Hence, preparation for the interview is absolutely necessary as questions and prompts will need to have some connection or relevance to the student’s essay. For example, the student will want to read corresponding chapters and sections from the primary textbook and other relevant resources, paying attention to cultural patterns and taxonomies/typologies as listed below one or more fitting to your essay and one or more with which you are comfortable along with concepts including, but not limited to, cultural identity, intercultural verbal and nonverbal communication, perception, and listening.
Sample questions for an interview, then, may include, in some fashion, the manner in which the interviewee experienced a collective vs. an individualistic family structure. Consider the variety of questions one could ask: Did you feel like a team or more as individuals in your family? Did your country stress what was “good for the country” or “what is good for the individual citizen?” Can you explain? How were decisions made in your family (e.g. where you’d go to college, who is responsible for what chores, etc.)? Thinking about the questions to ask during the interview and considering the course content one would like to explore is helpful. At the same time, one will want to “just listen” without asking questions for some of the interview time.
Please use this outline (link opens in new window) to format your essay. Understanding how you will be graded on your essay will be helpful as you organize your ideas and decide where to place the emphasis. As you will see in this rubric, (link opens in new window) the essay is about combining your own experience, observations, and insight with concepts you are learning in this module.
Citation Format: MLA (at least 5 citations required)
Submission Guidelines: Please attach your essay as a Word Document to the assignment titled [Your Last Name, First Name].Intercultural Essay.
[This assignment is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Lori Halverson-Wente & Mark Halverson-Wente and remixed by Dr. Elizabeth Robertson Hornsby]
Activity completion: set to "Student must submit this activity to complete it," with expected completion date if desired.