Lecture 4 Nonverbal communication

Lecture 4 Nonverbal communication

Lecture 4 focuses on the nonverbal communication. Through a small game, you will find that nonverbal communication sometimes has a stronger influence on us comparing to the verbal communication. Kinetics, body language, touch, personal space, paralanguage, and the concept of time convey a lot of information in the intercultural communication.

Before any lecture either open or save to your computer the assigned PowerPoint presentations.

Assignment before the lecture: none

Open or save the PowerPoint slides related to this lecture HERE.

Listen to the lecture, and afterwards do the assignment given below.



Write your learning experiences
into your personal
Reflective report

Assignment after the lecture: Your task now is to write down your own critical incident (or something that happened to a friend, family member, colleague, etc.). Do describe the incident with as many details and as vividly as possible, and including verbal and nonverbal elements of communication, by answering to the following questions:

  • What happened?
  • When did this happen?
  • Where did this happen?
  • Who were involved?
  • How did you feel?
  • Why do you remember the incident so well?
  • Why do you think that this happened?
  • What kind of cultural elements were involved?
  • What did you learn from the incident?

In your analysis try to come up with some culturally related explanations and reasoning to the incident. In addition, do try to see things and find explanations that might not be culturally related but happened due to personality, situation, circumstances, environment, etc. Write your thoughts into the reflective report.

Supplementary material:

The Critical Incident Technique (or CIT) is a set of procedures used for collecting direct observations of human behavior that have critical significance and meet methodically defined criteria. These observations are then kept track of as incidents, which are then used to solve practical problems and develop broad psychological principles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Incident_Technique

Some examples can be found at Kiira Maria Kirra, 2000. Ma-thesis “The types of problematic phenomena perceived by Finns in their communication with non-Finns : a study of critical incidents”

https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/handle/123456789/9117