【Talk about English】 我们究竟是什么 (Episode5-2/5)

英语自学网

来自不同文化的人不仅使用不同的语言，而且他们运用非语言沟通的方式也不同。当人们用与我们不同的非语言方式进行交流时，往往会出现一些问题。跟本期主播Marc Beeby一起来看看交流的特点吧。
       

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        Eilidh Hamilton
         
        英式拼写
全文听写
Eye contact is another form of nonverbal communication that can vary quite a lot between cultures. In England we consider that it's a sign of your honesty to look someone in the eye when you're talking to them and we believe that we can tell what someone is really thinking when we're looking in their eyes and interpreting what they're saying. However, some cultures consider direct eye contact to be disrespectful and they can feel very uncomfortable at staring someone directly in the eye. And this idea of different use of eye contact can lead to a lot of misunderstanding  
Eye contact with people when you're talking is definitely something that Westerners would put a high value on and if someone broke eye contact with them they might feel that the listener was bored, uninterested in what they were saying or rude. In the Middle East, especially because of the different interactions between men and women, a man would never maintain eye contact with a woman when he was talking to her, he would feel that that was an invasion of her privacy, I guess, so they would tend to look away, look over your shoulder, look down at the ground, move about. And even girls when they are talking to each other, men to each other, holding eye contact is not so important as we would think it is.
Eilidh Hamilton. Nonverbal communication is interesting because you can be using different forms in many different ways at once. So, you can be using your eyes in some way, you can be smiling, or frowning, or even keeping your face completely free of expression. At the same time you might be doing something with your hands. Now, unlike speech which you're either using consciously or you're not using, a lot of these nonverbal signals are difficult for us to control. What's more, they can contain a lot of information about how we really feel and think. As we've heard in previous programmes, the way people in a culture use their language - the language itself - often reflects the values of that culture. So, for example, a culture that values hierarchy, authority, the old, will tend to have lots of ways of expressing respect. Exactly the same sort of thing is true of nonverbal communication.