Interpersonal Communication in the United States

Midwestern Career College’s Interpersonal Communication in the United States program is designed to help students develop the face-to-face communication skills that business professionals need to succeed with U.S. clients or in U.S. businesses. A feature of the class is analysis and discussion of cultural differences in interpersonal communication norms. Topics include interpersonal relationships at work, intercultural communication inside and outside the workplace, the dynamics of small-group communication, the tone of messages (assertive, aggressive, and passive), and a problem-solving process with workplace applications. 

Program Objectives 

After successfully completing this program/course, students should be able to: 

• Explain how a communication situation is affected by physical, social, historical, psychological, and/or cultural contexts of the situation.  
• Create canned plans and/or scripts for common situations, including business introductions. 
• Describe and apply target guidelines for producing ethical communication. 
• Explain the influence on communication of differing cultural dimensions (individualism v. collectivism, low-context v. high-context; monochromic v. perceptions of time; low v. high uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculine v. feminine, and long-term v. short-term orientation). 
• Identify potential barriers to intercultural communication and ways to overcome them. 
• Apply target guidelines for improving semantics and/or pragmatics. 
• Give examples of different types of nonverbal communication and use nonverbal cues to enhance communication. 
• Identify challenges to effective listening and describe active listening strategies that can be used to overcome the challenges.  
• Identify dialectical relational tensions and/or emotional conflicts and describe ways to avoid or resolve them. 
• Describe different communication styles (passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, assertive) and possible effects of each on interpersonal relationships. 
• Identify target conflict-management techniques (e.g., lose-lose, lose-win, win-win), choose and apply one to a conflict to resolve it, and justify the choice.  
• Play one or more roles that people fulfill in meetings (task, maintenance, procedural), and use guidelines to evaluate performance of roles. 
• Collaborate to apply the steps in the target six-step problem-solving process often used in the U.S. to solve a business problem.  

Disclosures

• Consumer Information
• Tuition and Fees