English 343: Culture and its complexities

WEEK 2Recent approaches to culture

Learning, interaction and culture

Agenda

• Your Voices

• Overview of key concepts and theories

• Recent approaches to culture (Moran, Kumar, Wintergerst)

• Discussion Facilitation by Amy, Kelly and Kaitlyn Culture and its complexities (Kumar Ch. 2 & Interaction and culture in language teaching (Hinkel 1 and 2).

• Group Discussion: Teaching culture. Approaches to intercultural communication (Wintergerst, A. &McVeigh, )

Important terms and concepts

HinkelCHAPTER 2 AND 3

• Speech events

• Conversational Implicature

• Cooperative Principle

• Inner speech

• Habitus

• Interaction and culture

KumarCHPATER 2

• Habitus

• Cultural capital

• Otherization/cultural otherization

• The principle of linguistic relativity

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Your voices on culture…

Reflections, reactions, reappropriations, and more….

Shawn says…

• Ever since studying abroad, I've started to realize that culture was more than what I see, feel, hear, etc. It finally hit me when something incredible happened one time while I was studying abroad in Taiwan. This was how the story went…

• This is story is one of the many I know that has made me think about culture differences. I started to think about the "hidden" culture. The culture that isn't easily seen or noticed. From Wintergerst and McVeigh's book and Patrick Moran's Teaching Culture, I learned about culture being like an iceberg. There is a part that is seen (above water) and another part that isn't seen, but is there (below the surface of the water). My "hidden" culture is actually true!!

Victoria says…• I believe that, as nearly all our authors studied thus far, students

should discuss the idea of culture as an iceberg and detail what culture means to them. In this way, in reading their course texts, they can take all they read with the proverbial grain of salt; hopefully understanding that the small boxes shoved into textbook margins or short online videos featuring the same cast of characters at the end of each chapter is NOT representative of an entire people, its generations, its history, and even its present!

• There is so much more to a people than what can be demonstrated in reading a textbook and in 50 minutes of instruction... or even in 100 hours of instruction. Language instruction is an opportunity to get a glimpse at the tip of an iceberg that is the studied language. Language study opens the door so that each student might pass through and learn firsthand what the global perspective has in store on his/her adventure through Wonderland. Discussion of cultural 'norms' is helpful to students in understanding actions or ways of speaking which they might otherwise view (through ATTRIBUTION) as bizarre or offensive.

Tara says…• One concern Hinkel brings up is that foreign language can rarely be

learned or taught without addressing the culture of the community in which it is used. Unfortunately though, in many language classrooms culture is frequently reduced to foods, fairs, folklore, and statistical facts. Instead of teaching these surface level parts of culture, it is important to link the teaching of language to culture as a whole. Often times this is a difficult task and teachers are not trained in pedagogy courses successful ways of teaching culture and language together. Another concern is that even the nonnative speakers who have had many years of experience with the second culture may have to “find their own place at the intersection of their natal target cultures” (6). Also, although it may be possible to develop an intellectual understanding and tolerance of other cultures, it may not be as easy for people to become cognitively like members of other cultures. For example, it may be difficult for adults to see the world through culturally different eyes. When teaching Spanish I am challenged by these concerns because I have spent a very small amount of time in countries where the Spanish language is spoken; therefore, I have not developed my own identity within the target language culture and find it difficult to teach something I am not completely a part of.

Sarah says…

Second culture acquisition has been investigated from social, attitudinal, and cognitive standpoints. Adults are indeed capable of restructuring the culture to some extent but with the right motivation and context. Culture is better labeled as a verb, not a noun, because it is a dynamic process of transforming order in society and identifying formation. It is a prism through which we view life.

Victoria says…

• In class last week, when I related culture to water, you (Dr Lisya Seloni) asked me whether or not the water held the shape of its container even once removed. Thinking on this, and on this week's reading, I would say yes, but only to an extent. We are like ice cubes, forming since birth within a certain shapely confine: some round, some square, some heart or seahorse-shaped. Once we are removed from our specific local cultures, like the ice cube removed from the freezer tray, we melt over time. We may then re-form in a similar, but never quite the same shape, or we may take a new perspective-shape completely. However, we are still water and will always carry with us the minerals of our source (or in the case of my freezer here, little pieces of broccoli or spinach that we keep frozen for later use and which somehow always finds its way into the cubes).

Susana says…

• When I go visit family in Mexico I am shocked to hear that my cousins who speak only Spanish are listening music in English that is popular here in the United States. Also, the way they dress is also Americanized. They watch tv shows that are American. All of these ideas and concepts are in turn influencing their culture. When I hear the term "cultural otherization" I think of teachers having the potential to give students the idea that their culture is inferior to that of the teacher's self culture If the teachers to not make students feel that their culture is valuable. Having students articulate their own definition of culture is a great start to get an idea of what prior knowledge your students have. Maybe they know a lot about culture in general, but they struggle with their own culture and their own identity. I think that teachers should build awareness about stressed caused by cultural adjustments. Not only should the teacher be aware, but also he or she should make his or her students aware of how stressful making a cultural transition can be.

Historical Roots

• The word culture comes from early Latin, colere, which means to till or cultivate the ground.

• Since it is a contested and elusive concept, there are different ways of defining culture (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952):• Enumeratively distinctive ( a list of the content of culture,

values, Four Fs) • Historical (emphasis on social heritage, tradition) • Psychological and cognitively (learning, habit, adjustment,

problem-solving device, metaphors) • Structural (focus on the pattern or organization of culture,

systemic whole, patterns) • Genetic (focus on the origin of culture)

Recent Approaches to Culture

• Interpretivism

• Socio-cognitive perspective

• Critical Turn: Cultural Otherization and Orientalism

Interpretive approaches

• Concentrates on creation of meaning (Clifford Geertz): Culture means WEBS OF SIGNIFICANCE. People create meanings through interactions (spun the web and are suspended in them.)

E.G. There are studies which focus on graffitis and street art, and how grafittis are used to express certain feelings of protest, anger, etc.

• Moran’s five dimensions of culture (See Shaw’s Example in her blog)

• Culture as iceberg: Tacit and explicit dimensions of a culture.

• Getting inside the emic view: “We as language teachers need to acquire more information about culture—its products, practices, perspectives, communities, and persons.” (p. 29) Also, see an ESL teacher’s experience in Moran PAGE 29-31

Socio-cognitive Approach

• Intergroup perspective: Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1986; Tajfel, 1978)

Intergroup perspective replaces the construct of culture with the construct of group. Focuses on how group membership is created and how distinctions between in groups and out-groups are sustained:

• how people identify with groups , how others identify people as members of groups

• how groups define themselves and are defined by others

• how groups separate themselves from others and/or compare themselves with other groups

Socio-cognitive

• Aspirations and attitudes toward self and society: People have both an individual and a social identity.

Three basic principles:

- Individuals strive to achieve or maintain a positive social identity - Positive social identity is based to a large extent on

favorable comparisons that can be made between the in-group and out group

- When social identity is unsatisfactory, individuals either leave their group to a some positively distinct group or try to make their group more positively distinct

Critical Turn: Otherization and Orientalism

Otherization

• Reductive process that ascribe an imagined superior identity to the Self and an imagined inferior identity to the Other. “Colonizers systematically devalue the colonized and how develuation expends to every aspect of life. See Memi’s The Colonizer and the colonized.

Orientalism (coined by Edward Said)

• Western representation of the Other (i.e. East). “Orientalism is a systematically constructed discourse by which the West “ was able to manage—and produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (Said, 1978). Eg. Accents of Arabs in Aladdin. Aladdin is also Arab bur speaks English in Standard English.

• Produces an essentialist and static Other. “The discourse of orientalism is built on binary oppositions between East and West.

• Cultures, just like people, are not islands by themselves. They are all interconnected, making every culture, in effect, a hybrid culture.

Ethnocentrism

• “ Our tendency to consider our own cultural practices as superior and consider other cultural practices as inferior” (Wintergerts & mCveigj, 2011, p. 14)

Interview with Edward Saidhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwCOSkXR_Cw

• Take notes: What are some of the key arguments behind orientalism? What examples does Said give to Orientalism?

The discourse of Orientalism

Postmodern approaches to culture

Post-modern/post structural: Culture is no neatly packaged entities. They are NOT exclusive bodies of customs, values and thoughts. They are NOT perfectly shared by all who subscribe to them. Realities are subject to change.

Contact zone: The social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today”. (Pratt, 1991, p. 34)—bordercrossing/borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua.

Cultures as travelling (Clifford): Unrooted, permeable, ever-developing and changing.

Postmodernism

• “Postmodern thought values alternative discourses and meanings rather than… goals, choices, behavior, attitudes, and personality. Postmodern social scientists support a refocusing on what has been taken for granted, what has been neglected, regions of resistance, the forgotten, the irrational, the insignificant, the repressed, the borderline, the classical, the sacred, the traditional, the eccentric, the sublimated, the subjugated, the rejected, the nonessential, the marginal, the peripheral, the excluded, the tenuous, the silenced, the accidental, the dispersed, the disqualified, the deferred, the disjointed” (Roseneau, 1992, p.8 in Baldwin et. al, 2006, p. 20-1)

Commonalities…

• Culture is an elusive concept.

• It plays an important function in people’s and communities’ lives.

• Cultures are interconnected, making every culture a hybrid one. (Geertz “culture move live an octopus”)

• Some cultures play a gatekeeping functions. Still, it is the individual people and groups that shape (or cannot) cultural transformation.

Definitions of culture:1) A culture is “a text the vocabulary and grammar of

which its members learn” (Fay, 1996)

2) “Culture is a verb” (Street, 1991)

3) Culture is an “evolving connected activity, not a thing”. (Fay, 1996).

4) Believing…that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs (Geertz, 1973)

Your ideas?: What is important is NOT what culture is BUT culture does.

Language and cultureMoran and Hinkel

Culture and interaction

• Culture as a hidden curriculum (Byram, 1989)

“Leaners do not simply shake of their own culture and step into another culture. Their culture is a part of themselves and created them as social beings”

• The learning of a second/foreign language entaisl adjustments of the linguistic and cultural systems.

Studies of culture and sociolinguistics: Key terms and

concepts• Social anthropology: Way of life, identity, beliefs and

emotions (Geertz, 1973)

• Connection between language and culture: Moving beyond four Fs “foods, folklore, and facts” (Kramsh, 1991)

• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: language representing human experience

Strong version: Language determines thought

Weak version: Language influences thought

• Social meaning are encoded and linguistically represented in speech events (Hymes): Speech events: All forms of language including speaking writing, pictorial governed by social and linguistic norms.

Hymes Chapter 2

• “The goal of culture interaction cannot be to replicate the socialization process experienced by natives of the culture but to develop intercultural understanding” (Byram, 1991, p. 22).

Is foreign culture less learnable than foreign language?

How is it possible to create an intercultural understanding of the target culture?

Is it possible to become cognitively like members of other cultures? Can we learn to construct the world from different eyes?

Discussion Facilitation by…

Amy WolfKelley O’ReillyKaitlyn Swift

Group Discussion: Critical Cross-cultural Incidents

• Critical incident is a cross-cultural situation where communication breakdown might occur among the interlocutors.

• Please read the critical incidents and discuss what has caused the conflict. How would you approach to this incident?