ABSTRACT

Even the best verbal communication skills are not enough to create and sustain successful relationships. Good relationships, both at home and at work, require the ability to communicate with emotional intelligence.

Part of our culture involves an unspoken rule that people should ignore nonverbal elements– as if the injunction were, "hear what I say, and don't notice the way I say it." These elements are often ignored in school or overridden by parents, so the task of incorporating conscious sensitivity to nonverbal communications is made more difficult. Thus, this thesis is an attempt to provide a cross-cultural comparison of common conversational distances, their frequency used in American and Vietnamese cultures and factors affecting conversational distances.

Special emphasis is given to :

- classification and usage of conversational distances as well as and their usage

- factors affecting conversational distances.

The implications are suggested and recommendations provided for avoidance of culture shock and cross-cultural communication breakdown. For instance, American people tend to use close phase of intimate distance when showing intimate emotion with mothers more than Vietnamese. Besides, there is not much difference whether between brothers or sisters in keeping intimate distance when showing intimate emotion in American, whereas, Vietnamese people tend to keep closer distance with their sister than brother. It is also concluded that if two Americans of opposite sex informants are conversing, they find close phase easier, freer and more conventional , however, it is applied for every case that if the communicative partners are of the same sex then closer distance is more popular with Vietnamese informants