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One of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching online is interacting with students from different countries.

However, cultural differences sometimes cause misunderstandings — especially when they involve differences in communication style. This is because we expect people from other countries to have the same style as us, and when they don’t, we think they’re rude.

To avoid leaving a bad impression on our students, let’s go over different styles of communication and ways to adapt our own style when teaching students from different backgrounds!

Overview

Let’s first get an overview of the different styles of communication. According to the “Lewis Model of Cross-Cultural Communication,” there are three main styles:

Linear style, where people “communicate to give and receive information”,
Multi-active style, where communication is done to “express opinions and build relationships”, and
Reactive style, where people “communicate in order to create harmony”

For our purposes, let’s just call them “information-oriented,” “relationship-oriented,” and “harmony-oriented.”

(This diagram is adapted from Lewis' original image here.)

Take a moment to identify where your country falls on the chart and then see if your personal communication style fits the classification.

People who are more information- or relationship-oriented will want to take precautions when communicating with students from harmony-oriented cultures (and vice versa). However, this doesn’t mean that we should change completely for our students. After all, our students also need to get used to different cultures.

With first-time students though, slight communication style adjustment is necessary. Whereas a regular student is more likely to understand, a student meeting us for the first time may interpret our behavior as cold and indifferent or rude and immature, depending on their background.

Now let’s go over how to best communicate with people from each category.

Harmony-Oriented Cultures

Most of our students are from East Asia and have a harmony-oriented communication style.

Harmony-oriented people tend to be polite and accommodating. They listen more than they speak, dislike confrontation, and prefer not to openly disagree with others.

So how can this information help tutors? Here are two basic things to keep in mind:

If a new student doesn’t speak a lot, let’s not assume they’re shy. After all, they’re just used to listening more than speaking.
We can’t assume that we know what a harmony-oriented student thinks. As one tutor (🇧🇦) mentioned, “Sometimes, the student seems to be enjoying the lesson, but is just being polite!”

Most importantly, we should take extra care to be open and inviting — not opinionated or argumentative. So we’ll want to do the following:

control our volume and speaking speed, because raising our voice or increasing our speed seems aggressive
use plenty of diplomatic language, such as “but that’s just my opinion!”
let students take their time when they finish a thought (if we start speaking too soon, they’ll think we’re butting in!)
keep hand gestures and facial expressions to a minimum

That last point may seem unimportant, but as one of our tutors (🇷🇴) shared, “My students always said that I made a lot of gestures.” So even though we may not notice our own gestures, our students certainly do!

Information-Oriented Cultures

The information-oriented category includes core English-speaking countries, Scandinavia, and Germanic countries. Information-oriented people tend to be calm and direct. They prefer relying on “facts and figures” from reliable sources to make a point.

When teaching students accustomed to this type of communication, understand that their bluntness may not be a sign of rudeness. This means that you can also be more direct when correcting the student or providing feedback and advice. If you do sugarcoat the feedback, they may even think you’re being fake!

Relationship-Oriented Cultures

Relationship-oriented regions include much of Latin-America, the Arab countries, and the Mediterranean. Relationship-oriented people tend to be warm and friendly. When communicating with them, try to be more expressive. For example, use more animated facial expressions and hand gestures. If you don’t, they may think you’re a cold, unfriendly person!

To make a point, they tend to rely more on anecdotes and opinions. As a Latino comedian put it, "A Mexican mom doesn't give statistics, she doesn't give facts, she'll just give examples: 'You're gonna end up like your cousin Lupe.'"

Finally, they are used to speaking and listening at the same time, so they find silences in conversation awkward and will talk over each other to make sure it doesn’t happen!

📌 Takeaways

Again, as tutors, we shouldn’t totally adapt to our students’ communication styles. But we do want to make sure we don’t scare off the newbies!

So to recap, here are the main categories again and tips for culturally-sensitive communication:

Happy communicating!