Midterm Review: Questions/Reflections

1. Identify and discuss the five dimensions of Moran's definition of culture. What are some of the possible critiques/shortcomings of his conceptualizations of culture? Make sure your answer is grounded on the articles you read on this issue.
1. Five dimensions of Moran's definition of culture is people, products/artifacts, community, perspectives, and practices. People are the individuals who are part of the community and culture; products/artifacts are the things you hear, see, feel, etc.; community is where the culture is shared upon; perspectives are the view of the world and the ideologies; practices are what the people do. With all this talking about culture and encouraging teachers to be aware at the same time implementing this into the classroom, Moran knows to tailor to students' needs, we change the authenticity.
2. What investment in the context of language learning as described by Bonny Norton? How is it different than the concept of "motivation"?
1. According to Norton, investing in a language is more than just learning the language itself. You learn about the people, communities, ideologies, and a wider range of symbolic and material resources. When you invest in a language, you look more into the culture, more into the history, and in a way, it can also shape a new self-identity.
   Motivation, on the other hand, is learning the language itself. You can have all the motivation you want to learn a new language. There are two types of motivation: instrument and integrative. Instrument motivation is the motivation to learn a language to better your status for a job. Integrative motivation is the motivation to integrate fully into the language and culture community.
3. What are the findings of Kang's research on Korean immigrant parent's support of their children's language development?
1. Korean immigrant parents would pass their mother tongue to the next generation due to multiple reasons: language barrier in the community (cannot speak mainstream language, therefore have their kids translate), in case of returning back to Korea, and self-identity reasons.
4. Define Classroom Based Social Research (CBSR) Bonny Norton discusses at the end of her article. What are the values of this for multilingual students, and what difficulties do you foresee?
1. Objectives
1. Students find opportunities to interact with Target Language Speakers
2. Students will investigate when, how, and who to interact with
3. Students are encouraged to do a reflection after the interaction
4. Students will record anything unusual events (something that caught them by surprise)
5. Students will compare with other multilingual students
2. Faults: This is a great way for multilingual students to interact with target language speakers. However, the objectives seems to encourage students to find differences between the two speakers. For example, it has been asked for students to record anything unusual during the interaction. This suggests that students should be finding differences rather than similarities. If one of the differences (or the unusual) is seen done by the target language speakers, multilingual students might identify this as they do this during interaction and I do this during interaction; and this creates a separation.
5. Describe Pavlenko's study titled "The Making of an American: negotiation of identities at the turn of the 20th century". What's the importance of looking at the identity narratives of immigrants? How does negotiation of identities in early immigrant memoirs compare to that in contemporary immigrant autobiographies? What does Pavlenko think about the differences we see in these narratives?
1. Many of the autobiographies of early immigrants are success stories; stories of success. However, recent immigrants did not portray that. There are success stories, and stories not so successful. Pavlenko suggested this means that the early immigrants did not have a choice of accepting America or not. They couldn't negotiate between cultures whereas the recent immigrants did.