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.

Midterm Review: Key Terms and Concepts

1. Key Terms and Concepts
1. Moran's five dimensions of culture 
1. Products/artifacts
1. The things that are used
2. Buildings that are built
3. Food
4. Folklore
5. Fashion
2. Practices
1. What individuals do
2. Festivals
3. Persons
1. Communities
2. How things are shared within one another
4. Perspectives
1. World views
2. Ideologies
3. Attitudes
5. Communities
1. Sharing the culture
2. Changing all the time
3. World is getting smaller (due to technology), global culture
2. Essentialist vs. non-essentialist views on culture 
1. Essentialist
1. Culture is easily defined
2. Easy to distinguish between cultures
3. Culture is concrete (by the way they act, dress, eat)
4. Generalization and stereotypical
2. Non-essentialist
1. Culture is flowing and hard to pin-point
2. Culture does not define everyone who is subscribed to a culture
3. Culture is complex
3. Contact zone
1. The space where cultures meet and clash
2. Hybrid culture lives here
4. Post-structural definitions of culture (Moran)
1. There is no one definition of culture
2. It's not exclusive to one group
3. Identities intersect and contrast each other
5. Conversational implicature (Hinkel: Lawrence F. Bouton)
1. ELL's speaking with NES might have different implicatures, therefore misinterpret or not understand what the message might mean or infer
2. 6 types of implicatures
1. POPE Q: answering a question with another question
2. Indirect criticism: often a request of evaluation of something is followed by a criticism
3. Relevance-based: what's happening the world around them relating to the occasion
4. Sequence of Events/scalar: what happened first and next in one sentence, but not the other way around
5. Minimum Requirement Rule: asking if a person has made it to a certain degree and beyond but not asking if the person achieved that degree
6. Irony: sarcasm?
6. Cultural capital, habitus (Kumaravadivelu)
1. Habitus: habitus is acquired through one's daily life. It shapes one's attitude, words, and deeds.
2. Cultural capital: Culture can be created through socialization and education. It can help individual cultural growth and community cultural growth.
7. The Principle of linguistic relativity/Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Kumaravadivelu)
1. The Principle of Linguistic Relativity
1. Strong: Language determines thought
2. Weak: Language influences thought
2. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Language determines thought
8. Otherization (Kimaravadivelu), orientalism (Kumaravadivelu), ethnocentrism (Wintergerst)
1. Otherization: self is good and others are bad. Devalue of others
2. Orientalism: eastern culture is better than western culture
3. Ethnocentrism: own culture is better than any other culture
9. Investment vs. motivation (Norton)
1. Investment
1. Learning a language is also shaping who you are
2. You acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources
2. Motivation
1. Instrumental motivation: learn a new language for benefits of getting a better employment
2. Intergrative motivation: learn a new language to integrate oneself in the target language community
3. Investment vs Intergrative motivation
1. Investment is also including an understanding of complex social history and multiple desires
10. Language and identity connection (earlier vs. the most recent perspectives in TESOL) (Pavlenko)
1. First generation immigrants
1. Tries harder to be Americanized
2. Identities were not negotiated in the past
2. The turn of the 21st century
1. Associated with own identity more and reshaped American identity (except Asian American)
2. Being more "American" meant to give up own culture and identity
11. Family language practice (Kang)
1. We studied Korean-American families' family ideologies and practices
2. Passing mother tongue to second generations for language barrier reasons and if the family ever needs to return back to Korea
3. Family language policy: What parents do with the language in the home (based on what the parents feel about the pass of the language)
12. Contrastive rhetoric and critical views on contrastive rhetoric
1. ELL's writing is written through the style of their native culture
2. Every language and culture have their own writing style

Reflection of Hinkel's Culture in Second Language teaching and Learning :: Ch. 4 Kachru's Culture, Context, and Writing and Ch. 6 Harklau's Representing Culture in the ESL Writing Classroom

Culture reflects in writing. In my opinion, any form for communication reflects culture. With that, is it okay for the teacher to correct the student's writing style? Is it acceptable for the students to reflect their culture through their writing? In my personal opinion, it should not. However, does that disable a student from perfecting their form of communication to become an NES writer?

Topics are also important for the students to write about. If the student cannot relate to the topic, and the topic is supposedly something the students can relate to, it is definitely not a good choice for the student. Therefore, the product of the writing will not be exactly what the teacher is looking for. Instead, it would be a made up story or a story half-told. As teachers, we need to understand the students by knowing some topics cannot be written about simply because it has never been experienced by the students.

Should students separating we and them as in Americans and people from their home country, respectively, know they are separating themselves, unconsciously, from their home country? Maybe the students are not separating themselves, but rather, locating themselves. "We" as in Americans because the student is in the States; "them" as in their home country also saying that they are not in the country?

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Reflection of Severino, Guerra, and Butler's Writing in Multicultural Settings :: Silva's Differences in ESL an Native-English-Speaker Writing: The Research and Its Implications and Kubota's Japanese Culture Constructed by Discourses: Implications for Applied Linguistics Research and ELT from TESOL Quarterly

I've always heard about writing that are different grammatically compared to Native English Speakers (NES); but I've never really heard about the context that is being said in the writing. Now thinking of it, it makes sense. Certain cultures have certain ways of communicating including speaking and writing. It's a way of expression one self. In an English setting, some of these ways of writing could be strange.. but is it wrong? It's just a way of expression, no? Of course, if the importance of the ESL's writing is lost in confusing with grammar, of course that would need to be corrected. However, if a writing is written in a "situation-problem-solution-conclusion pattern" (ESL student) and not "claim-justification-conclusion patter" (NES student), is there a big difference?

Western culture and eastern culture is different and it could be seen in students writing, or any forms of communication. As what Hinkel and Silva from the previous posts talk about culture reflecting in writing, you can also see the "easternization" or the "westernization" the student may possess. Teacher should be aware of differences and be open about it. However, teachers should not assume all students are the same if they come from the same cultural background. (Note!)

I guess, there probably is a big difference if a persuasive paper is to be written. There are certain styles that the audience tend to prefer over another. Martin Luther King Jr. has a very good persuasive speech. With that kind of writing style in as a model, ESL students can learn from it. According to the text, giving some time for the students to write, it could help students be more aware of what they should change and improve. But as teachers, we cannot turn down the students and make them self-conscious of what they have written.

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Reflection of Kang's Early Childhood Education :: Korean-Immigrant Parents’ Support of Their American-Born Children’s Development and Maintenance of the Home Language

This article makes me question what truly is bilingual? Is it attainable? In my opinion, probably not. You can never be truly monolingual too, if you ask me. There are so many phrases and words in every languages that you would probably have to be a polymath to even reach a significantly more amount of vocabularies than an average human being. Even so, you would not know everything. Just a lot.

According to Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) by ACTFL, there are ten levels of language proficiency: beginner-low, beginner-medium, beginning-high, intermediate-low, intermediate-medium, intermediate-high, advanced-low, advanced-medium, advanced-high, and superior. To reach to the superior, you would have to be specialized in a certain area to talk about a certain topic and use certain vocabularies others who didn't obtain your education otherwise wouldn't have.

The research study Dr. Kang has done on Korean-American families is very interesting. Although it might work to a certain extent, I do think the researched is a little bit biased. Even though the conversations in the household is audio-recorded, it definitely puts a pressure on the family to have to feel obligated to talk. With this kind of unnatural setting, there is definitely a very big variable in the study.

Some questions I have for Dr. Kang (as an ISU professor and coming to our class as guest speaker!!):

• Was this research most for Korean-American families? If so, are you planning to have more studies on other languages?
• In your research, there were 7 Korean-American families. Have you ever thought of expanding this research into nation wide?
• What do you think of Dual Language Schools with implements of two languages one being English? Research have shown Spanish and English being very efficient, what do you think about Korean and English?

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Language and Culture Trajectory

This website shows my identity and how I see myself. It talks about the people who are important around me and influences who I am today. All of my family members are bilingual and it is part of the Taiwanese culture. Taiwanese culture is a pretty hybrid culture. It includes traditions from Japan and China. With that, older generation Taiwanese can speak three languages: Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Japanese. In recent generations, however, more and more Taiwanese are becoming bilingual in just Mandarin and English; Taiwanese language is slowly dying off.

I would like to point out that in this entire website, I mentioned that I have never spoken Taiwanese back to my relatives or parents. Although it is true in a way, I am not blaming my family for my lack of fluency. The reason why my sister, my cousins (in Taiwan), and I were never asked to speak Taiwanese in return was because it would help us no good in the future. However, in a way, I do feel like I lost that part of my identity. During family gatherings in the US, it was usually hard for me to contribute to family conversations. Some of my family-members-by-law doesn’t even speak Mandarin. That only leaves me to force myself to speak Taiwanese, speak English (which can seem to appear rude), or to not speak at all.

Right now, I am in the process of learning Taiwanese. I hope one day, I can speak well enough to communicate not just to my family members, but to the community in Taiwan. Taiwanese is a language that is quiet hard to pick up because there is no writing system. Not many classes offer Taiwanese in Taiwan either. The best way to pick it up is to slowly immerse myself into the culture.

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Reflection of Pierce's Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning :: Volume 29, Spring 1995 (p. 9-31)

When teaching English as a second language, it is important that students receive as much exposure of the language they can outside of the classroom. This type of authenticity creates an easier route for students to pick up English. Unlike teaching English as a foreign language, most of the practices of English would be held in a classroom.

According to Pierce, there are five objectives a CBSR (classroom-based social research) might have

1. Investigative opportunities to interact with target language speakers
2. Reflect critically on engagement with Target Language Speakers
3. Reflect on Observations on Diaries on Journals
4. Pay attention to and Record Unusual Events
5. Compare data with fellow students and researchers

The five objectives, in my opinion creates the most authenticity a classroom and get. This will have the students not only be interested in what they are learning/doing, but also start investing in it. When students achieve the five objectives, it makes this statement true: "... those who speak regard those who listen as worthy to listen and that those who listen regard those who speak as worthy to speak." Sooner or later, the students in your class will one day be able to gain enough courage to speak up for themselves using a language they think makes them inferior.

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