The United States has the diverse culture where people from different ethnic, social and racial backgrounds have developed the interactive pattern on their daily routines. Since I have moved to the United States to persuade my studies and career, I have been an interacting number of group members every day. However, everyone makes use of English as his or her main course language to interact on a daily basis. I look back my childhood memories where I was taught English in the classrooms, and I read some books and stories that told about the American culture (Sedaris).
Moreover, I have learned to speak well English, but I still have the glimpse from my childhood where I often find myself discovering the different words looking back to the small dictionary in my bag. The gestures, body language, other nonverbal, and verbal communication ways are still strange to me at times. In this document, a brief discussion regarding my personal experience in a group is shared. It explains in the context of communication barriers that an individual faces moving in the American society that I have experienced being the group member.
Besides, I have lived for a longer period in the United States. I have come across people from different cultural and ethnic background. However, each of us strived to speak English in the best possible ways we could, ensuring our accents, right ways to pronounce words in the groups to improve our impression and outcomes. During the presentation, there were people having the different accent for a similar word as they all belonged to the different background.
Even the natives of the United States, Whites, Hispanics, and black Americans had different ways to speak. However, every time they spoke some word I use to concentrate the way they speak actually to identify how one word could be spoken through different ways. For a moment, my mind flashed back to my classroom in the home country where my teacher scolded me while I was reading my textbook. My teacher emphasized over and over that I have to make use of the right Phoenix while reading the book. I felt disengaged at so many times while I was talking to my friends.
There were different events when I felt secular among my group members as I only came to the US four year ago from Cuba. The pattern of interaction, choices and activities were different. These factors often made me feel lonely and disengaged with the group. Also the ways they share affection in terms of gestures were way different from the culture I belong.
Translating words my friends spoke into my native language so that I understand the meaning of it in a right way. Often coming home I used to recall the new and unusual words that I have heard and spelling it out like I used to do in my kindergarten classes. Once I used to get time I used to pick my dictionary from my bag to see the meaning of the word I heard. However, later I realized that Phoenix I used to spell the word were way different. In this all time I felt different and isolated with my childhood memories because of the communication barriers.
I think besides of being a group member communication patterns have a different interpretation that connects each of the individuals to their native language. The connection of emotions and gestures with each of the words I spoke was different from how I felt about it. In the United States, people belong from the different culture, and each one of them has different ways to pronounce a word. I was able to learn that the meaning remains, and accent has a little impact on the communication. It is the clarity of the words that matter more than anything else.
Works Cited
Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day. New York: Little Brown Book, 2010.
