Part II of Intercultural Dimensions of Task-based

Learning for Authentic Communication

Presented at ACE 2009 Osaka Oct 24-25

(not submitted for Proceeding – 5000 word limit)

How is Metacognitive Inculturization Accomplished?

There are five stages in the process of metacognitive inculturization: 1)

contextual reframing, 2) incorporating old and establishing new patterns of

social interaction, 3) building trust and areas of comfort and challenge, 4)

teaching both communicative instructional tasks and the communication and

learning strategies that enhance their mastery, and 5) evaluating reflectively

the learning of both the communicative and the metacognitive content. Each of

these will be explained in more detail below. In the practical reality of the

classroom, neither are the five stages given equal emphasis nor are they

accomplished with equal success because the success depends on the will,

expertise, and management of the teacher. Important to understand is the fact

that these stages are not at all sequential; in fact, two or more of the stages

may be operating simultaneously. A classroom lesson plan may incorporate

goals to address several of these stages at once. Furthermore, it should be

recognized that because the goals of this process result, to a large extent, in a

significant paradigm shift for the students, the process is neither quick, simple

or without some measure of stress for both the learners and the teacher. The

process actually takes months to accomplish as classes at most Japanese

universities and colleges meet only once a week over two semesters from April

to July and then again from September to January for a total of about 28 ninety-

minute lessons. More immediate success might be possible if the inculturization

process could be undertaken in an intensive course or during more frequent

class meetings, but these are administrative and curricular decisions over which

most teachers have little control.

Contextual Reframing of the Learning Enviroment

Foremost in the process is consideration of the context in which the

learning takes place. Because of the nature of their previous experience with

classroom learning of English as was described earlier, it is paramount that

reframing the context of the learning environment be a significant purpose of

metacognitive inculturization. The primary method of reframing the traditional

context for classroom learning is re-defining the nature of the classroom through

identifying new purposes for the classroom as a language-learning environment.

The second way is to alter the physical arrangement, movement of people, and

range of activities that take place so that the students can accept their

inculturization within a new learning environment. In reality, the re-defining and

the altering of the classroom environment are accomplished using the same

actions. However, it is essential that students be asked to reflect on their new

understandings or changes in concepts about the nature of teaching and learning

in a classroom. Initially, the instructor may actually perform for students – reciting

a poem, acting a scene from a play, or singing a song. The purpose is to re-define

the idea of the communicative language classroom beyond the students’

traditional view of the kyoshitsu to include new images as an area for

performance: theatre or concert hall (gekijo). Later in the course, the students

themselves are asked to perform as actors in a communicative situation or to

create original dialogues in the target language. An in-depth look at one of the

typical re-framing activities should help to make the intent and technique clear.

Often on the first day of the course, a simple information gap technique that

encourages students to inquire and to collaborate is employed to change their

concept of the what activities and interactions take place in this new classroom

differently from their previous ones. Especially at the beginning, the students are

very curious about the instructor, who may very well be the first foreign person

whom they have ever spoken to. Learning that a brief “life story” by the instructor

will be half-full of lies, the students must cooperate to confirm what they have

understood and then plan questions to ferret out the truth from fiction during a

whole class press conference where the interviewee must tell on the truth. Such

an activity puts their standard perception of the nature of classroom learning on

its head. It’s interesting, entertaining, and interactive. It requires thought,

communication with peers, posing questions in English in front of a group, and its

rewards are the satisfaction that is received from understanding and

communicating about real meaning in a foreign language. Other techniques that

are employed both at the beginning and throughout the course are the use of

music, rhythm and group improvisation, a variation of seating arrangements,

changes of classroom venues, use body movement and total physical response

activities, and the use of games or manipulative objects.

Another re-definition of the what has their typical education experience,

which is often stressed to students during the metacognitive inculturization

process is the concept of the ‘learning space,’ i.e. redefining the idea of what a

classroom is. The ‘other’ conception of the classroom that is reframed during this

phase of metacognitive inculturization is the re-definition of the classroom as a

gymnasium, as running track or fitness training room (undojo or taikukan), where

actual physical skills are learned, rehearsed and practiced. To learn to speak a

foreign language effectively and fluently, one must actually speak it orally.

Speaking English in a normal spoken voice appears to be quite a ‘foreign’

behavior for many language students in Japan, this physical act of speaking must

therefore be reinforced by actual practice. Still another conceptual view is to

redefine the classroom as a laboratory (jikkenshitsu), where language

experiments are carried out, in which reflecting and thinking are valued, and

where there is the risk of failing to achieve perfection on the first try.

Incorporating Old And Establishing New Patterns Of Social Interaction

In the next phase of the process using social structures and common

ways of organizing behavior from Japan’s group-oriented society, it is possible to

assist the students in working cooperatively to overcome the barriers that impede

oral communication. Many social constructs use for classroom collaborative

instruction can be taken from Japanese society. These instructional methods are

drawn from the students’ own experiences, and then explicitly adapted for use in

whole class, small group and pair activities for achieving communication in

English.

For those educators familiar with the research literature on cooperative

learning, it might be too easy to try to draw parallels between its tenets and with

what is being described here. However, a significant difference is that cooperative

learning is built on a Western paradigm of group-building and consensual

management, which does not take into account the unique characteristics of

Japanese social behavior. These social constructs are employed to help

inculturate the students into the new values and new expected behaviors for the

intercultural communicative classroom’s metaculture. One common institution in

Japanese society where these social constructs can be observed and one in which

many students have direct experience is the high school club or university circle,

normally called bukatsu. The contextual and metacognitive cross-cultural training

being employed is an explicit, mutually-actualized, teacher-mediated process for

intuitively, and in part counter-intuitively, inculturating the students and the

teacher into the new classroom culture (or instructional meta-culture). One could

not be successful in this attempt if the students’ own sociolinguistic background is

completely ignored. Instead, a concerted and carefully planned effort is made to

build up a set of adaptive, communicative cross-cultural learning behaviors based

on some of the forms of social communication that already exist. Commonly

found in almost all aspects of Japanese group-oriented social behavior, some of

the most useful constructs include kyoroku (cooperation), kunren (training),

sekinensha (responsible person), daihyo (representative speaker), kenkyusei

(researcher), jikken or kento (experiment, trial), happyo (presentation), renshu

(practice), junbi (preparation), chikara-awase (pooling strengths), kakunin

(confirm), hone-tatemae (private self, public self) among others.

The key to successfully building a set of intercultural adaptive and

communicative learning behaviors lies in forming and maintaining functional

groups within the classroom. Freshmen students rarely know each other and from

a third to a half of all university instructors have students sit in assigned seats by

student identification number. Consequently, an initial communication activity,

such as the one in which the students interview the teacher, may provide an

excellent opportunity to establish the first functional groups for the classroom,

based on camaraderie. At times, various other temporary grouping arrangements

are employed depending on the purpose of the activity; however, the students

are generally kept together with the “home” group for stability and ensuring a

level of comfort with the group behaviors they will be asked to learn. Asking

groups to work together (kyoroku suru or cooperate) in completing their

attendance taking, or doing a learning task as a group, for getting a different

representative (daihyo) from the group to act as spokesperson, or to be

responsible for reporting (sekinensha) what the group has reflected upon, or in

assisting and monitoring each other’s practice (kunren) are ways to build group

cohesiveness and to make use of the prevalent constructs of social behavior

already existing in their culture to enhance communication in the foreign

language classroom.

Building Trust And Areas Of Comfort And Challenge

Learning does not occur in an affective vacuum. People need to trust

each other, and enjoy the experience of success in learning, including

experiencing the challenges, and overcoming difficulty. Students, and certainly

their teachers who are committed to helping them learn, want to enjoy learning

and look forward to their achievements in the acquisition of a foreign language.

When reaching into unfamiliar territory and trying out new behaviors, learners

have to be supported with an environment of trust, respect for trying something

new and the risk it entails, and a sense of accomplishment. Clearly the home

groups are able, with teacher guidance and modeling, to provide a good deal of

this support; and as time goes by, they voluntarily take one more responsibility in

this area. The teacher, on the other hand, must wear two hats (at least these two

roles): one is that of the encourager and supporter, while the other hat or role is

that of the challenger and judge (i.e, giving grades is a judgment). It makes the

teacher’s role more complex, but also more rewarding for both students and the

instructor. In a large sense, the teacher behaves more like a coach for a team of

learners than as a lecturer. Sometimes praise and encouragement are the most

important words at the moment; while at other times, some comments that

challenge or exhort the learners to greater effort are demanded. If these words

are amply measured out with generosity, genuineness, humor, kindness, and

enthusiasm, the students will understand the real message, despite intercultural

barriers to real communication. By doing so, the teacher is saying: “What we’re

learning is important, and how well you are learning it is important to me and to

you, too.” Similarly, providing classroom activities that challenge learners to

move beyond their current level of competence (Hadley, 1993, p.269) is also part

of the role of teacher as coach.

Teaching Communicative Instructional Tasks

By skillful reliance on the patterns of behavior prevalent among Japanese

groups and the new social patterns and definitions that have been introduced, the

teacher can undertake management of the many instructional variables in order

to show students how to adapt these to form a “new” metaculture in the

classroom to promote their progress in language competence. Since the core

purpose being the building of communicative competence in a foreign language,

one should examine the nature of this competence. Legutke and Thomas (1991,

p. 265) have expanded Canale’s (1983, p.5) explanation of communicative

competence by adding a fifth component: 1) linguistic competence, 2)

sociolinguistic competence, 3) discourse competence, 4) strategic competence

and lastly, 5) intercultural competence. John Corbett (2003) makes an elegant

argument in his book for the restructuring of emphasis in foreign language

teaching to bring cross-cultural knowledge and intercultural communicative

competency to the center stage of the instructional process.

Consequently, the communicative instructional tasks in metacognitive

inculturization classroom may take various forms, have different but related

purposes, and involve differing levels of teacher direction or guidance and with

various levels of student dependence or autonomy in addressing the various

competencies of communication in English as a foreign language. Instructional

management decisions also play a key function in setting up the requisite

expectations for their success. Some of these teacher decisions include: the

choice of language of instruction, the push and pull of teacher direction in

combination with increased requirement for autonomy by learner groups, the use

of physical and language games, information gap activities, humor, sign

language, e-mail, simulations, role-plays, culturally enlightening videos and other

media, artifacts or realia, masks, puppets, pantomime, costumes, music, and

drama.

The cross-cultural training prescribed by the actual implementation of

these communicative learning activities then forms the basis for classroom

expectations and interactions as the students then proceed to acquire more

specific language competencies and to master particular forms of discourse

required for effective communication in English.

New Modalities and A New View of Language

Not only are the ways that students and teachers interact varied form

culture to culture, but so are the ways that students interact with each other.

Students in a monolingual EFL classroom have to be taught how to initiate and

learn new models of interaction with their peers in the “new” culture of the

language-learning classroom. One of the important ways to do so is to validate

their own forms of culturally-normed communicative interaction. While at other

times, it assists the goals to bring into the language classroom forms of

interaction that do not typically occur in their own culture under this classroom

context, or with these individuals. As has been pointed out, a good model is the

Japanese university and high school club activity group (bukatsu). Additionally, by

commandeering one or more modes of communication from the broadcast and

telecommunication media as “new” communicative contexts, the teacher can

help students structure and learn new forms of interaction in the target language.

Examples of such new communicative contexts and modalities include mobile

phone conversations, e-mail and Twitter messages, chat rooms, game shows,

news programs and radio talk shows, as possible examples. Providing

instructional experiences with these types of communicative contexts gives

students a broader repertoire of interaction in the target language. Helping the

cross-cultural differences in how these various modes (or forms) of

communication and their usage differ from one culture to another is also

enlightening and builds intercultural competence.

It is quite important to get students to see the true nature of language by

careful observation of native speakers first in their own language, then in the

target foreign language. Corbett (2003, p.105) describes in much detail how this

concept of the foreign language learner as ethnographer can be employed to

develop an entire ICC curriculum. Most students are under the misconception that

utterances are single, linear threads of talk, whereas, in reality, “getting

utterances attended to and identified is just as much a joint action as getting

them understood” (Clark, 1996, p.253). In actuality, what people say when they

speak in normal conversation is mostly non-linear, often rather random, with

stops and asides, often changing midstream, and conversations often occur on

more than one track simultaneously. EFL students form monolingual societies

often have to be retrained (and reminded) in order to keep them from expecting

themselves and their interlocutors to speak the foreign language like actors

speaking in a Hollywood film – simply imitating a perfect native speaker. It is not

natural and forces them to compare themselves with a false standard, which can

be debilitating and self-discouraging.

Another understanding that sheds important insight on how real people

use real language for communicating meaning comes from the field of discourse

analysis. By helping students to see how ‘language form follows language

function’, the teacher provides them with an additional framework for building

spoken texts beyond the sentence-level and for structuring talk which follows

regular patterns depending on the situation and purpose (McCarthy, 1991, p.1).

The discovery that the norms of discourse differ according to situation and intent

of the message, but still are consistent and predictable within the same purpose

and context is an enlightening cross-cultural realization for many second

language learners. It may very well be so for even the language instructors

themselves. Additionally, learners are pleasantly surprised to find that the norms

of discourse differ widely from culture to culture. In other words, the way people

argue, use names or do not, or answer the telephone can be starkly different

across cultures or even with subgroups with a culture.

Communicative Strategies

Equally important to adopting new contexts and modalities for

communicating is the knowledge of how to successfully manage, maintain and

repair breakdowns in an actual communication in a foreign language. This

knowledge can be taught and practiced through communication strategies, which

gives students greater metacognitve control over their growing confidence in

intercultural competency in acquiring of target language when intercultural

communicative strategies are added to the repertoire. Communication strategies

are those used by a language learner, in fact any speaker, to promote

communication and to adapt to failure to achieve meaning (Tarone, 1981).

Therefore, it is important to teach and help students to monitor such their own

communication strategies. Some of the common ones are listed below:

1) opening and closing a more formalized conversation or

discussion,

2) identifying and employing open and closed questions to enhance

exchange of information,

3) encouraging communication by a) using a short response to

show that you are actively listening (similar to Japanese

conversation custom of aizuchi, e.g. “I see. Really? Is that so?

(So desu ka) b) using an auxiliary to make a question, e.g. “You

did?, Didn’t he? You were?.” c) repeating a key word or phrase,

e.g. “participate?, Paris?,” d) asking a follow-up information

question, e.g. “”What happened? How was it? What did you do

then?” e) seeking other’s opinions, e.g. “What do you think

about it?”, f) encouraging other’s points of view, e.g. “I think

you have a good idea.”, “It sounds like you’ve thought a lot

about it.”,

4) seeking to understand by asking a metalinguistic question, e.g.

“What does ‘participate’ mean?, Did you say “cross from?, What

can I say when I want you show I am not very happy about

that?” and

5) using non-verbal communication (gestures, facial movement,

sounds) to maintain the communication.

Students should be taught how to use these strategies, and monitored in

their use of communication without words using hands, arms, face and other

nonverbal methods, such as sounds, along with vocal texture and pitch to help

maintain the type of oral discourse which is needed to accomplish the

communicative goals, such as a casual conversation to meet someone new, or

the sharing of opinions in a more formalized conversation or a discussion in a

business meeting. Recognition of and mastery of communication strategies can

be very valuable to the language acquisition process and can make great

contributions to the development of the learners’ strategic competence (Hadley,

1993, p. 268). This type of metacognitive knowledge also lends support to the

awareness and improved intercultural communicative behaviors that result from

increased emphasis given it during the process of metacognitive inculturalization

advocated in this paper.

Incorporating Learning Strategies for Cross-cultural

growth

Entire volumes have been written about models of instruction for

learning strategies for foreign language acquisition. It is beyond the scope of this

paper to fully describe these models and their implications for learners in a

monolingual EFL classroom who are receiving contextual and metacognitive

training for inculturization into the new culture of the communicative classroom.

However, assignment of a classroom task offers the teacher an opportunity to

also proffer a metacognitive, memory, cognitive, social, affective or metalinguistic

learning strategy to assist the students in not only accomplishing the present

task, but in gaining a repetoire of learning strategies to improve the process of

foreign language acquisition for themselves. Ian Tudor (1996, p.197) calls this

type of a language education one that serves ‘to promote learner empowerment’.

For example, when a video segment is used in class as the target text of a

language lesson, it also will serve as an opportune time to introduce such learning

strategies as predicting, directed or selective attention (deciding in advance to

attend to specific aspects of language or situational details), self-monitoring

(checking or verifying one’s comprehension during the language task),

summarization, questioning others for clarification, and cooperation (working

together to pool information). A comprehensive list and detailed explanation of

learning strategies have been presented by O’Malley and Chamot (1990).

Evaluating the Learning of Communicativeand Metacognitive Content

The evaluation of communicative content is undertaken both

progressively during the course itself and in a final ‘exit’ performance exam at the

end of the course. The central question then is: Can the students communicate

effectively and in an inter-culturally appropriate way in selected situations in the

target language? This exit performance has often taken the form of an interview

and focused conversation with an individual student and the teacher. Another

common method is to ask a pair of students to improvise a conversation based on

a randomly chosen situation similar to one which has been introduced and

practiced during the course. With the students’ permissions, videotapes can be

made of the conversations for later review and analysis. On the other hand, there

has been less success in evaluating how much of the metacognitive content has

been absorbed by the students in terms of formal evaluation or collection of

actual data from the course participants. Much of this evaluation is anecdotal in

nature and draws upon student comments and self-evaluations at the end of the

course. Further strategies for obtained more accurate and useable data in area is

considered a future priority. With the advent of increased international media

and globalized telecommunications, especially those using the new advanced

Internet tools (Web 2.0), it is becoming increasingly possible to have students

communicate directly – albeit, in a digital or virtual mode, using web video chat or

Skype – with actual native speakers of the target language. Assessment

strategies are evolving and new forms of testing and evaluation are changing the

way we can observe how well our students can communicate and to what degree

they are inculcating the new behavioral and attitudinal norms at the heart of an

intercultural communicative competency approach.

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