Cultural competency training in physician assistant (PA) education may improve patient care outcomes and help reduce health disparities. Research suggests that incorporating cross-cultural communication techniques into healthcare delivery improves provider-patient relationships, patient satisfaction, adherence to treatment, and health outcomes. While PA accreditation standards include mandatory elements regarding cultural competency training of PA students, there is little research on how PA students feel about the effectiveness of this training. This study focused on determining PA students’ perceived levels of preparedness to treat patients of culturally diverse backgrounds. Specifically, the study evaluated PA students’ knowledge, skills, encounters, attitudes, awareness, and abilities regarding cultural competence, as well as students’ evaluations of these components of their education. The study utilized an online cross-sectional questionnaire with quantitative and qualitative components to 239 PA student respondents across eight American professional preparation programs in higher education institutions. The survey used a modified version of the previously validated Self-Assessment of Perceived Level of Cultural Competence Questionnaire (SAPLCC). Descriptive statistics were measured using SPSS software (v. 24). Independent sample t-tests identified significant differences in subscale scores between race and academic year. Qualitative data were hand-coded for common themes. Overall, findings showed that PA students rated their attitudes, awareness, and abilities about cultural competence as significantly greater than their knowledge, skills, and encounters. Specific areas of identified weaknesses in cultural competency education included: knowledge regarding the cultural context of care; skills associated with managing cross-cultural clinical challenges; and encounters related to coping with aggressiveness and bias. Further analysis indicated that second-year students and non-Caucasian students reported higher personal ratings for levels of cultural competence. Qualitative data provided further insight into students’ levels of preparedness, indicating that most surveyed PA students felt well prepared (39%) or moderately prepared (46%), rather than those who did not feel at all prepared (15%). Students indicated that specific classes focusing on cultural topics, discussions about cultural issues, and clinical experiences were the most useful for promoting cross-cultural education. Future investigation might explore the effectiveness of standardized approaches to training, how student perceptions align with actual care outcomes, or examine how diversity within PA programs impacts students’ preparedness to provide cross-cultural care.

A chain of actors brokers the flow of information through news organizations and transforms local realities into international journalism. “Fixers” are a crucial intermediary link between foreign reporters and local sources, translating, arranging logistics and interviews, and otherwise assisting reporters in gaining access and interpreting events. Fixers’ social networks and management of exchange between reporters and sources, this study argues, significantly shape the news. Brokers’ moral worlds, constituted by both norms of behavior toward brokers and norms that shape the behaviors of brokers themselves, are the focus of particular attention. How do news organizations, client journalists, and local news sources and power holders treat fixers? How do fixers navigate the uneven moral terrain created by conflicting expectations toward them? And how do their strategies for managing clients and sources shape the production of knowledge? This study, based on ethnographic research conducted in Turkey between 2014 and 2016, explains fixers’ mediations and their effects on the news. Empirical chapters provide composite narratives of fixers to illustrate both variation in mediating practices and typical career trajectories, followed by theoretical discussions. The production of international news, I argue, cannot be properly understood without reference to the national and local politics and media worlds that affect who becomes a fixer and what they use fixing to accomplish. Based on these contexts, some see fixing as an opportunity to gain recognition, as an apprenticeship toward a career in global journalism, or as a way to expand their social world; others see fixing as a way to remain anonymous while utilizing journalistic expertise they have developed, as a relatively safe form of activism in non-democratic political systems, or a step toward claiming refugee status. Patterns in who becomes a fixer and why affect the selection of “newsworthy” sources and events, the way local realities are transformed into information fed to client reporters, and the organizational structure of the foreign press corps. Fixers have difficulty, and are socialized to avoid, challenging overarching and preexisting meta-narratives, or frames, that foreign news organizations apply to Turkey and Syria. Nonetheless, they make use of “wiggle room” afforded them through the process of abstraction of local complexities into overarching narrative frames to shape international news in ways that are significant at the local level. This study offers insights not only into the production of international knowledge about Turkey and Syria, but also into the process of brokerage, a universal phenomenon in all contexts involving coordination of action and sharing of knowledge across social difference.

We all use our language as one of our main modes of communication. Stan Klipper, the progatonist of Stan in Prague, found himself in a position where language has failed him, yet with the lack of language, his other senses have also failed him. When Stan was sent to Prague on a vague business trip, he decided to hire a translator to help him close the language gap, which in his case was huge. With his translator, Ihar, and Ihar's girlfriend delha, Stan maneuvers his way through the cramped streets of Prague, to open the lands of the Prague suburbs and into his own confusion. / by Justin Waldron. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

In this thesis, I adopt the anti-essentialist cultural paradigm to explore the complexity within the processes of both cultural-making and personal acculturation that may occur in an interweaving way within a local cultural arena (Holliday, 2011; 2013).More precisely, I contextualise this study in student group work as the specific cultural arena to investigate the cultural-making process towards group cohesiveness and individual group member's acculturation process. A conceptual framework is suggested after synthesising both the debates between the essentialist and the anti-essentialist cultural paradigms in the field of intercultural communication and the discussions on acculturation in the existing literature. I conceptually argue that culture is constituted by various salient aspects vis-à- vis cohesive thinking and behaviours that are always forming and re-forming. Personal acculturation can be explored through tracing the changes of an individual's cultural realities (Holliday, 2011; 2013). Both of them occur in parallel in a cultural arena (in this case, student group work).Through analysing in-depth, narrative data from 15 participants about their group work experiences, I fine-tune and enrich this conceptual framework with empirical evidence (i.e. the findings) to demonstrate complexity (i.e. uncertainty and fluidity) in the cultural-making process as well as the dynamics and unpredictability of personal acculturation (i.e. an individual presents different trends of the key aspects of acculturation). Furthermore, I also identify four types of personal acculturation trajectories by comparing all the participants' acculturation trajectories. Using this fine-tuned conceptual framework, the author of the thesis strengthens the potential links between the two separate, in parallel, but interrelated processes (e.g. cultural-making process and personal acculturation), which seem not to have been paid enough attention in the existing literature vis-à-vis the study of culture and (personal) acculturation. More importantly, the author argues that the links can be interpreted as an interplay in student group work asthe specific cultural arena.

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Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been prioritized as the key instructional approach in colleges since the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a revised syllabus in 1999 that underlines college EFL students' communicative competence. The issuance of the syllabus was followed by a series of reforms on curricular designs and teaching methods. However, CLT has encountered great resistance. College teachers and learners are constrained by socio-cultural influences such as the perceptions of teachers' roles and ways of learning and teaching (Hu, 2002; Rao, 1996). Although some teachers have shown positive attitudes towards CLT, in general they have failed to practice it communicatively. This thesis discusses solutions and provides suggestions after delineating the difficulties these teachers and learners have encountered particularly. Taking into consideration China's increased global impact and internationallycollaborating programs that are currently conducted in many universities, this thesis highlights that CLT is an applicable approach to improve students' communicative competence.

I sought to link, through this paper, cultural performances of identity through storytelling in Ireland, Scotland, and southern Appalachia. I evaluated storytelling practices, whether it was a public or private performance, using symbolic interactionism, dramatist theory, narrative paradigm, and performance theory. The author studied abroad in Ireland and Scotland through the East Tennessee State University Appalachian, Scottish, and Irish Studies Program and experienced an array of stories. She then evaluated her own experiences with storytelling from growing up in southern Appalachia and visited the International Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. The research is rooted in grounded theory from ethnographies, with themes emerging from the field notes. The themes reinforced the theories evaluated tied the cultures together through history.

Thesis (M.A. (African Languages)) --University of Limpopo, 2005 / This study explores the use of nonverbal communication in Northern Sotho discourse. The paper serves as an introduction to the study of nonverbal communication in African languages. The concept of nonverbal communication is as equally important in a communication system as verbal communication . Therefore, this paper focuses onsome of the various forms of nonverbal communication such as facial expressions, proxemics, haptics, personal appearance, and most importantly, the concept of time. This study is done mainly in comparison with the Western way of doing things and how the social changes affect the use of these cues

This study was undertaken to determine the dominant cultural metaphors at work in American and Japanese organizational culture, to examine the ways in which each society interprets these metaphors, and to assess the importance of the metaphors relative to intercultural communication. Using a combination of qualitative content analysis, rhetorical criticism, contextual analysis, and non-participant observation, two of the most dominant metaphors in both cultures, business-as-war and business-as-family, were discovered and examined. The research data comes from a variety of books, scholarly and popular articles, pamphlets, unpublished papers, films, and miscellaneous documents. These materials cover many disciplines: communication, history, popular culture, sociology, psychology, business management, and literature. Additional written and verbal information obtained from personal interviews conducted at a Japanese-owned American-staffed manufacturing facility supplements these materials. By applying Osborn's (1967) theory of "archetypal metaphors," or metaphors which strike deep into the human subconscious, Gozzi's (1990b) concept of "minimetaphors" which arise from these archetypal metaphors. and Hall and Trager's (Hall, 1973) "major triad" (formal, Informal, and technical) of behavioral modes, the following conclusions were derived (1) many metaphors appear in both societies, but the familial and military metaphors dominate the business cultures, (2) viewing business as a war developed out of the violent histories of both cultures and perpetuates harmful attitudes, (3) viewing business as a family developed out of the homogeneity of the Japanese culture, but it did not develop as readily in the more heterogeneous United States. (4) each society interprets these metaphors in different ways, making them culturally unique but not culturally exclusive, (5) different interpretations may arise from the ways in which the cultures transmit the metaphors, (6) many of the minimetaphors associated with both of these archetypes no longer refer to their original meanings, and (7) multinational corporations will transmit their own unique cultural metaphors to their foreign employees.