Callum: Hello, today in Talk about English we have the fifth programme in our series on culture and communication. TodayMarc Beeby looks at the topic of nonverbal communication – communication without language. People from different cultures speak different languages but also use non-verbal communication in different ways. Here’s Marc. Marc: Human beings have a tendency to react positively to sameness and negatively to difference. So if people use non-verbal communication in ways we recognise we tend to think of them as people we can get on with. When people use nonverbal communication in a way that is different from what we’re used to, there can be problems. And non-verbal communication can vary enormously from culture to culture. But what is ‘non-verbal communication’? Well, I suppose the first thing most of us would think of when we hear that phrase is how we communicate using our bodies - our body language - the way we use our hands, our faces, our eyes. Here’s Rebecca Fong again with comments from Dionne Charmaine from Jamaica, Kyung-ja Yoo from Japan, and Eilidh Hamilton, who spent several years in Syria. Rebecca Fong The degree to which we use our bodies to accompany our verbal messages varies a lot from culture to culture so that some cultures, African Americans for example or Mediterranean cultures will throw their arms around and move around a lot when they're speaking. Dionne Charmaine Jamaicans do that a lot they have a lot of gestures - lot of hand movements. The hand movements indicate that you've kind of lost control in terms of what you're putting across you're just so emotionally caught up or so angry or whatever. And again if someone's angry you'll get the hands above the head and so on. Rebecca Fong Scandinavians on the other hand are much cooler and don't really move their bodies so much when they're talking. Japanese, for example, think that it's a violation of social harmony to print your individuality and your ideas on the world with your arms as you're speaking. Kyung-ja Yoo We don't use body language. I wouldn't say not at all but we don't use our hands or arms when we are talking. And in Japan, especially women, really doesn’t stare at the people. Rebecca Fong Eye contact is another form of non-verbal 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 Eilidh Hamilton 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 talking to each other, holding eye contact is not so important as we would think it is. Marc: Eilidh Hamilton. Non-verbal communication is interesting because you can be using different forms in many different ways at once. ... Группа Learning English. Продолжение текста здесь: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/scripts/whoonearth/tae_whoonearth_05_080529.pdf