This week’s articles focused on an ongoing debate in TESOL which
looks at including culture in teaching ESL students. The first article I read
was Kubota’s Unfinished Knowledge: The Story of Barbara. I really enjoyed how
Kubota expressed his findings in this article through a fictional narrative.
Kubota states his arguments very early on in this article. He mentions that
teachers who use culture in teaching ESL students usually have good intentions by
respecting their student’s cultural differences rather than denying them. I
agree that some of these teachers adopt the liberal view of cultural
differences and mistakenly create a barrier between their students and
themselves. Kubota also states that to understand cultural differences critically
we need to look at issues of power and discourse. Ultimately Kubota doesn’t
have a clear answer or explanation on incorporating culture into teaching ESL
students, but his article does allow us as readers and as future educators to
explore the issue more in depth and lead us to creating our own explanations.
I really enjoyed reading this article which tells the story
of a college writing teacher’s first experience with ESL students and how she begins
to look at multiple academic points of view and how her perceptive on cultural
differences in the classroom changes over time. Barbara is the teacher who has
her first students from culturally diverse backgrounds. In desperation she asks
her colleague Carol who has background in TESOL to help her. Carol talks to Barbara
about the importance of recognizing and respecting cultural differences which
incorporate different social values, beliefs and customs. While Carol’s
statements and the background information she shares about Korean, Japanese and
Chinese culture are helpful- I believe Carol needed to be more careful in
avoiding generalizing these students. Barbara did take their discussion as a
learning experience and started doing her own research. Over time, Barbara
began feeling comfortable with her culturally diverse ESL students and asked
them questions about their linguistic and rhetorical conventions in their
native language and how they different from those in English. While I don’t agree
with Barbara’s focus on cultural differences I did like that she looked to her
students for reinforcement. She asked her students for feedback but I would
assume that her discussions of the lack of critical thinking or directness in
Asian cultures might discourage some students from participating. Barbara needed to keep in mind that all students differ even within what she sees as their
cultural identity. I did like that Barbara believed that no student should ever
abandon their own culture however students may need to adopt certain
cultural conventions to succeed in the academic community. This reminded me of
our discussion on Ebonics. I believe that Ebonics could be very successfully incorporated
in the classroom to help make learning relevant to students who use it.
Unfortunately, I know that many teachers do see Ebonics as a misuse of the
English language and don’t believe it has any place in the classroom. While it is
understood that Standard English is important to be successful in our society,
we shouldn’t ban the use of Ebonics in our classrooms. We can show students and
encourage them to use Standard English in certain situations but to not allow
students to use Ebonics could exclude students and discourage participation. We should never
allow students to discard part of their cultural identity but we can teach our students
what they need to be successful, whether we believe that is right or not.
When love interest David is added
to the story he introduces the essentialist position and the constructionist view
of culture. I thought how David explained these views to Barbara was very interesting
and helpful for her as a teacher. An
essentialist views culture as a fixed category, as something that just “is”. A constructionist
views culture as a creation of politics etc, something that we as a society
creates. These two views see culture as something that just has
characteristics, or as something we create by giving it these characteristics.
This idea showed Barbara what she was missing in her teaching. While she
believed there just “were” cultural characteristics, their discussion helped her
explore the idea that we are defining cultures. She was then encouraged to look
at readings that examined images of cultures and what the mean in relation to
power between the West and non-West. She realized asking some of the questions
she asked her students enforced polarized and fixed ways of viewing these
cultures. She saw that she should not be endorsing cultural stereotypes and not
promoting English and American culture as worth anything more than their native
culture. While Barbara had been trying to incorporate student’s cultures into
the classroom she was afraid she was doing more harm than good and after more
research she was able to challenge these stereotypes and produce better
discussions in her classroom. Have you ever felt that even though you were
trying to be accepting of other cultures you were making assumptions about this
group? How can you change your own thinking?
The next article I read was Japanese culture constricted by
discourses: implications of applied linguistics research and ELT. Like the
first article this article also expands on the idea of drawing on cultural
differences between ESL students and the target academic community. As Barbara did, these individuals tend to
create a cultural dichotomy between the West and the non-West. Part of Kubota's article looked at Nihonjinron which are theories
on the Japanese and assuming that Japanese people and culture have unique
interpersonal relationships, group psychology social behaviors lifestyles,
language use and business management and even biological brain functions (page
12). Kubota highlights recent studies of schooling in Japan which finds the opposite
that instead Japanese education goes education goes beyond mechanical learning,
lack of individualism and memorization. While secondary education was said to focus
more on memorization, creativity, original thinking and self-expression are
still fostered. I believe these findings could be found in my own middle school
here in the United States. These studies
and others challenge cultural representations in education of Japanese students.
We as educators need to understand these labels and move beyond them.
These two articles and Connor’s Changing currents in
contrastive theoretic: implications for teaching and research were really
helpful for me to read as I study TESOL. I know it is difficult in my own experience
to avoid our own stereotypes. These three articles worked so closely together
and really helped me consider the advantages and disadvantages of focusing on
cultural differences. While teachers , may have good intentions they need to be
careful to avoid making assumptions about their students.
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