Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is perhaps the most important academic skill. Some people think it is the about the
ability to criticize something but this is not true. Critical thinking refers to the ability to think about
something very logically to understand more about it and come to a conclusion about what you
believe about it. To be a good critical thinker you need to:

 understand how ideas are logically connected or not

 identify and evaluate the opinions of other people
 make decisions about your own opinions
 understand how your own ideas and opinions affects how you think
 make decisions about how important ideas are
 use information to reach conclusions and solve problems

One way to develop good critical thinking skills is to ask questions about what someone says. These
questions should not have easy answers, like “yes” or “no”. If they are good critical thinking
questions, people should be able to discuss them for a while.

Look at the script from the high and low context culture talk below. Look at the first sentence, which
has been underlined. Here are some critical thinking questions you might think of about that
sentence:

 How does a person’s culture influence how they live, play, work or communicate?
 Where does this happen the most? Where does it happen the least?
 Why does it happen?
 What are some advantages of being influenced by your culture?
 What are some of the disadvantages of it?

The culture in which a person is socialized and acculturated influences the manner in which he or
she lives, plays, works and, most importantly, communicates with others. If we wish to
understand and communicate effectively with people of different cultures, it's important to
understand how culture affects communication. Culture can be conceptualized in many different
ways; one common conceptualization of culture focuses directly upon communication. This idea
was advanced by Edward T Hall, an anthropologist who spent years living among and observing
people of many different cultures. In order to understand his idea, it's important to understand
two basic forms of communication; high context messages and low context messages.

Using the rest of the tapescript, use critical thinking skills to write some discussion questions about
the topic of high and low context culture.