My cultural identity and intercultural awareness Essay

My cultural identity and intercultural awareness - Essay Example As a native of Iran, I was accustomed to Iranian ways of thinking, feeling, reacting, dressing etc, all of which can be described as the Iranian culture based on Hofstede’s (2001) definition of culture. By nature, I am emotional and quiet, but not shy, female that loves to socialize, make friends, and self-confident as well as determined young person. My determination and focus helped me in earning admission in UK to study English Language. My experience in the UK has been very different from what it had been when I was growing up in Iran, which made me feel different about myself and my nature. Initially, I felt confused, lost, and low in confidence. Subsequently my self esteem lowered and I also started feeling disgusted and rejected because of low acceptability among my peers. The learning from intercultural awareness seems to provide solutions to the challenges that I am faced and also the answers to most of the questions that I had. With time passing in the UK, I started to realize that people around me are different and have different belief systems, behaviours, and attitudes, which probably is the UK culture. I learnt that culture and language are usually associated with unique ideologies that become the basis for judgment as well as relationship development (Piller, 2011). Judgements that are usually formed on the basis of ideologies lead to the formation of differential opinions about people from other cultures due to differences in their behaviour, attitude, personalities etc (Lewis, 2003). I can understand why it took more than two weeks for me to earn a good friend; my way of dressing clearly indicated that I was from the Middle East, which probably made my classmates to form opinions that I am from a different world and a different kind of perso n that they could not relate to. These opinions together result in stereotyping the individuals or groups based on prior knowledge and understanding related to some