Week Seven Readings

Will Baker asserted in “The Cultures of English as Lingua Franca” that ELF doesn’t have a particular and distinctive culture all its own. Rather, the culture of ELF is constant flowing and changing from conversation to conversation. This cultural variance is caused not only by the different cultural backgrounds of the speakers, but also by the variety of discourses of the speakers and the qualities that the speakers choose to perform for their audience. In fact, these last points apply not only to ELF conversations, but all communication in any language. This is why cited researchers Scollon and Scollon refer to interpersonal interactions as “interdiscourse communication” rather than “intercultural communication.”  

Baker analyzed many ELF conversations and concluded the above, and applied this knowledge to propose the pedagogical insight that ELF participant must be prepared to engage in communication through exercises in cultural awareness, language awareness, and accommodation skills. These are interesting findings, and the teaching points seem like meaningful goals, but I often wish that the authors of such articles would offer specific examples or ideas of how their suggestions might be applied in the classroom. For example, teaching “cultural awareness” is a broad and ill-defined goal for teaching, and many instructor, such as myself, would have a difficult time of implementing such a program of learning. It’s difficult to visualize what a course teaching “accommodation skills” would look like when it is so different from anything one has seen before.

The article “Recording and Analysing Talk” by Meredith Marra was extremely interesting and enlightening as to the lengths to which some researchers will go to get the best, most accurate data possible. These New Zealanders sought to analyze the nuances of Maroi communication in the workplace. To do so, they painstakingly trained themselves to understand and enact some of the most important qualities of the Maori culture. The researchers realized that they had to behave in ways that would make their Maori subjects comfortable, rather than themselves, if they were to gain authentic and complete data. They also included the Maori in the data interpretation phase of their study, to ensure that they were making accurate conclusions rather than making presumption based on misunderstandings.

Chapter 6 in International Englishes…provided background information and methodology for conversation analysis. It also provided some interesting elements to include in a successful English as an International Language pedagogy, such as teaching repair strategies like asking for clarification, rephrasing, or allowing wait time; and teaching basic conversation skills of expressing disagreement, turn-taking, and taking leave.

The most interesting part of the article was the discussion of the most common grammatical and phonological errors that ESL speakers make. The chapter provided a list of all of the common errors that do not impede communication. According to the chapter, many TOEFLs and experts think that English instructors should focus only on the errors that DO impede communication, rather than burdening their students with all possible errors, thus overwhelming them. This immediately sounded problematic to me, as I believe a complete education is the only education. I also know that if I was taught another language and later found out that I was making errors no one had told me about, I would not be happy at all. As I continued the chapter, I realized that others agree with my concerns. In fact, many students want to attain a native-like grammatical proficiency, so it is, indeed, inappropriate not to teach it completely. This did lead me to wonder, though, how many English instructors are, in fact, ignoring those common errors that don’t affect communication, and how many Spanish errors did I make in my Spanish courses that my professors never told me about!?

Week Six Readings

            Two of this week’s articles, “Japanese Culture Constructed by Discourses” and “Unfinished Knowledge,” review similar concepts to those discussed in last week’s class. The stereotypes applied to Japanese ESL students that are summarized in these texts are very similar to those of the Chinese and Indian stereotypes; indeed, they are all part of one larger “Asian” stereotype.

            According to Kubota, many characterize the Japanese culture as homogeneous and group-oriented and they further state that these characteristics stifle the creativity of Japanese students. Some experts apply these issues to contemporary writing pedagogy, which dictates that collaboration ought to be a key element of the writing classroom. Kuboto cites Carson and Nelson as saying that Japanese students may not perform well in collaborative writing groups, because they would be focusing on harmonizing and achieving a group goal rather than giving constructive criticism to their peers and striving to achieve individual success.

            Other voices in the field problemetize the perceived deficiency of Japanese students in the art of critical thinking. For example, Ramanathan and Kaplan suggested that Japanese students don’t have the critical thinking skills and cultural background to comprehend and achieve audience and voice, other significant aspects of current writing pedagogy, considerations in composition classroom.

            Kubota goes on to explain that even Japanese ESL students themselves serve to perpetuate the misunderstandings that these stereotypes create. For example, Kubota cites Fox and her own Japanese students describing the Japanese writing style to be characterized by indirectness, vagueness, and politeness. These self-described features are reminiscent of the Kaplan doodles for Asian writing.

            The “Unfinished Knowledge” article presents an interesting fictional narrative of one writing teacher’s experiences with first embracing and perpetuating cultural stereotypes in her writing classroom without even realizing it, then realizing what she had been doing was wrong, and investigating ways to correct it. The best line in the entire story was when Barbara, the subject of the story, was at the height of her stereotyping methods: “Sometimes, she felt confident enough to point out cultural characteristics of a given country when a student from that country failed to notice them” (p 14). Hilarious.

            The Connor article was a little confusing, as it seemed to affirm some of the Kaplan-esque conclusions about distinctions between the writing styles of various essential cultures. Throughout the article, she cited specific differences between the writing styles and content of professional individuals from Finland, Senegal, America, and Belgium. As far as I could see, though, particularly in the examples of cover letters for a job application, the differences noted were no more significant than one might expect to see when comparing samples from two Americans from the same cultural background. Nobody writes in exactly the same way, and nobody follows the exact same prescription for what ought to be included in a given format or mode of writing.

            Overall, I didn’t find the articles to be particularly interesting this week, as they seemed to mostly support and summarize conversations we have already had. I did notice, though, that some of the characteristics of traditional Japanese educations practices that have been criticized as so very different from those in America are not only the exact same as teaching practices in this country from as recently as the 1970s or 80s, but that some of the practices mentioned are having a resurgence in contemporary classrooms. For example, Duke observed that Japanese classes in 1986 focused a lot on choral responses, and I recently learned at an RtI teaching workshop that choral response is an extremely valuable tool, if used properly, for ensuring engagement in the classroom.

Week Five Readings

            The most interesting article assigned for this week was “Cultural Assimilation and Its Delusions.” I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the emphasis put on Christianity as the religion that was any immigrants’ ticket into American culture. It shocked me that even modern-day Harvard scholars were encouraging immigrants to eschew their own religion and replace it with the “religion of America” – Protestantism. This really disgusts me, for are we not supposed to enjoy freedom of religion? This idea of America being a Christian country founded on Christian ideals is not a new one, and it is commonly expounded by certain politicians more frequently than my stomach can handle, but to try to force it on immigrants as if their entire belief system and way of conceiving of the world is inferior is even more reprehensible.

            “Problemetizing Cultural Stereotypes” was also interesting, particularly when it pointed out the fact that even American students exhibit some of these common Asian stereotypes in the classroom. This is so obvious that I can’t believe it has to be stated. Yet, I must admit that I was surprised to read that the author experienced unruly students in India, as I too had fallen under the general assumption that Indian children were earnest learners. To be fair to myself, this impression came from the real-life knowledge that all of the Indian students I had as a tutor at Sylvan were not there to catch up to their peers, but to get even farther ahead of their peers than they already were!

Week Four Readings

            This week’s articles and selections from the text book all focused on similar themes, but it wasn’t until I read the last section in Holliday that I really began to connect the dots. The brief summary of Shumann’s theories on social and psychological distance from the 1970s really tied everything together for me. The concepts that really struck me in these readings were the affects of social cues and what Shumann calls social solidarity.

            Something I had never considered before is the extreme difficulties of an immigrant dealing with culture shock, or - more specifically - changes in social cues. Not only do recent arrivals need to learn the vocabulary, grammar, and complicated idioms of the second language, they also have to learn what is different about their new home’s social cues. These cues can have a tremendous impact on the success of a conversation with a member of the “target language” group, as in the example of the college student requesting a letter of recommendation from an advisor.  To this, Peirce adds in her “Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning” the added layer of difficulty of not only understanding the social cues of the target language, but also understanding its “rules of use” and how those rules support the dominant group in the new society.

            When a teacher of language learners takes all of this into account, the task of effectively preparing one’s students for successful communication seems unreasonably daunting. Peirce included in her article some excellent examples of teaching strategies to use in their classrooms to assist students with these problems, such as investigating opportunities to interact with native speakers, reflecting on interactions with target language speakers, and recording in a diary events that are surprising or unusual to ask about later. Although I do not teach non-native speakers, I did realize that these strategies could very easily be applied to other general education settings, as well. For example, I have a student who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s. This child has just as much, if not more, difficulty in interpreting social cues and understanding the “rules of use” in his culture. The recommending teaching strategies for language learners could be used to help him learn to understand and get along with his peers.

            Back to the effects of Shumann’s theories on my understanding of these concepts, I was also intrigued by his theory of social distance and the effect that social solidarity has on it. It’s interesting to think about how mutual the language acquisition process has to be: the newcomers and natives have to be almost equally willing for learning to take place in order for it to be successful. The former group has to be receptive to learning and using the target language while the latter group has be to receptive to teaching and understanding their new neighbors. What strikes me most about this is how much it also applies to general education. Not only do students need to be curious and eager to learn; their teachers need to also be willing to understand each student and his or her unique needs and abilities. In so many ways, ESL education is very closely related to general education.

            I have not yet mentioned the second article for this week, “Language and Identity.” The most interesting part of this text was a statement made by Richard Bauman: “Individual identity is the outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others.” (p 35) What I like about this statement is that it concisely explains a very complicated process. And I hope I am interpreting the “situationally” part correctly, but it really gets to the heart of what I think of my identity: I really feel that, perhaps more so than others, strategically choose from a variety of personal identities depending on the situation. In fact, everyone does this to a certain extent, particularly teachers, and I like to see it included in an identity theory that does not specify that the selections must be made due to culture shock, as was suggested in one of last week’s articles.