Cultural Schemata Theory:
Together with formal schemata and linguistic schemata, cultural schemata are some of the main types of schema theory, which is a hypothesis on how knowledge is gained and processed. Actually, schema is a technical word used by cognitive supporters to explain how people arrange, process, and store information in their brain. Notably, schemata focus on how people arrange information to long-term memory in relation to experiences, attitudes, values, strategies, skills, and conceptual understanding. The schema theory is founded on the belief that every act of an individual's understanding includes his/her knowledge of the world. The received knowledge is in turn organized into units that contain stores information.
Understanding Cultural Schemata Theory:
Cultural schemata is also known as abstract, story, or linguistic schema and is developed on the basis of people's basic experiences ("Schemata Theory in Learning," n.d.). Cultural schemata theory is described as the pre-existing knowledge about cultural elements of language being learned. This theory refers to the role of cultural relationship that is needed to understand the meaning intended by the author. Moreover, the theory is important in bringing about cultural familiarity and enables individuals to restructure the story line based on their own personal or cultural appropriate scripts. Therefore, to interpret and understand a script from a different culture, the appropriate cultural schema is considered to be essential.
It's important to note that cultural schema theory describes the familiar and pre-acquainted knowledge that a person uses when describing a familiar situation in his/her own culture. Furthermore, cultural schema theory for social interaction is defined as cognitive structures that consist of knowledge regarding the face-to-face interactions in an individual's cultural environment.
Cultural Schemas for Social Interactions:
Intercultural communication and relations between people has been analyzed in several research areas including the analysis of psychological response to unfamiliar environments. In attempts to explain these relations, various schemas have been developed with the most common types being personal, cultural, and universal schemas. In relation to social interactions, cultural schemas basically consist of cognitive structures with information about face-to-face interactions in a person's cultural environment. These cultural schemas for social interactions are developed and stored in an individual's brain through two major ways. These ways are when individuals interact with members of a similar culture in particular conditions several times and when these individuals talk about certain information with members of the same culture severally (Gudykunst, 2005).
These schemas become more abstract, organized, and compact when these people continue to encounter or talk about similar situations more often. Therefore, cultural schemas for social interactions are developed either by a person's direct experiences or by talking about information that is related to the cultural schema. The tight organization of cultural schemas through these two ways makes the information to become more usable. These people start to access the cultural schemas and use them as efficient units of information amongst members of the culture. With the cultural schemas becoming more compact, abstract, and organized, people's communication become much easier.
Generally, cultural schema theory offers an interface where the interplay of culture, cognition, and language can be observed effectively (Malcolm & Sharifian, 2001). Consequently, it can be assumed that cultural schemas act as templates that assist in the interpretation of cultural events and can be analyzed through text evaluation or experiments. Based on the cultural schemas for social interactions, a person's underlying cognitive processes and structures feed and are fed by the existing cultural systems.
In order to achieve cooperation in intercultural communication, an evaluation on how cultural values are practiced is various daily contexts is essential (Niwa & Maruno, 2010). This is largely because an individual's participation in cultural practices enables him/her to internalize cultural values. In his/her interactions with other people, the internalized values guide the person to behave in a culturally specific way. The analysis of what is important in life is different across cultures and different types of behaviors may...
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