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 Belgium
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.
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