Audience Diversity and Delivery 13.4 277
• Consult with other speakers who have presented to your audience. Talk with people
you may know who are familiar with the cultural expectations of the audience
you will address. Ask specific questions. For example, when speaking in
Poland, one of the authors expected the speech to start promptly at 11 a.m.,
as announced in the program and on posters. By 11:10, it was clear the speech
would not begin on time. In Poland, it turns out, all students know about the
“academic quarter.” This means that most lectures and speeches begin at least
15 minutes—a quarter hour—after the announced starting time. If the author
had asked another professor about the audience’s expectations, he would
have known this custom in advance. As you observe or talk with speakers
who have addressed your target audience, ask the following questions:
What are audience expectations about where I should stand while
speaking?
Do listeners like direct eye contact?
When will the audience expect me to start and end my talk?
Will listeners find movement and gestures distracting or welcome?
• Monitor your level of immediacy with your audience. As we noted earlier,
speaker immediacy involves how close you are to your listeners, the amount
of eye contact you display, and whether you speak from behind or in front
of a lectern. North Americans seem to prefer immediacy behaviors from
speakers. Some cultures may expect less immediacy. For example, we’ve
been told that Japanese audiences don’t expect speakers to move from be-
hind a lectern and stand very close to listeners. Even in small seminars,
Japanese speakers and teachers typically stay behind the lectern. The key is
not to violate what listeners expect.^36
• Monitor your expression of emotion. Not all cultures interpret and express
emotions the same way. People from the Middle East and the Mediterranean
are typically more expressive and animated in their conversation than are
northern Europeans.^37 People from a high-context culture—a culture in which
nonverbal messages are exceptionally important (such as Japanese or Chinese)—
place greater emphasis on the delivery of a message than do people from a
low-context culture (such as North Americans).^38 Remember, however, that
even though you may be speaking to an audience from a low-context culture—a
culture that places a high value on verbal messages—you do not have license
to ignore how you deliver a message. Delivery is always important.
• Know the code. Communication occurs when speaker and listener share the
same code system—both verbal and nonverbal. Your words can be translated,
but learning the nonverbal code of your audience is also important. One
of your authors embarrassed himself with a Caribbean audience because
he used a circled thumb and finger gesture to signal “okay” to compli-
ment a student. Later he discovered that this was an obscene gesture—
like extending a middle finger to a North American audience. Even subtle