Hegemony in culture?

There's no way around it.

A few years ago I was in Tenerife at a conference in which several presenters argued against that fact that publishing in international journals requires non-Anglo-Saxon scholars to adapt to Anglo-Saxon norms of writing and thought (short, straight to the point, etc.). Shortly afterwards, in my research on critical cultural awareness (as defined by Byram), I came across literature (and I damn myself for not having saved it!) that argued agains the concept of 'critical' as being a universally accepted positive norm. In other words, in some cultures, being with the norm and not critical of it is seen as a positive value.

Suffice it to say, that when trying to write a chapter on culture and CALL for an American publication, how to we move beyond these concepts that 'we' hold as being 'universally true' for culture/language learning, when indeed, as we say in our own articles, any communicative event we partake in is inevitably influenced by our own life-worlds (culture, fields, etc.). I presume at this point that we can only take a stance and explicityly say 'this is where we are coming from and what we plan for our students' and hope that helping them (i.e. the students) develop an open mentality towards other cultures, to de-center their situatedness, will allow them to accept that maybe other cultures do NOT indeed give the same value to this de-centering as we do. We are coming from the hegemonic perspective of English and Western World and must instill this reality in our students and help them always take it into consideration when interacting with others.

As Mike Levy says in his article in LLT (2007):

These goals [the ones I mentioned above] go deep and are profoundly and genuinely felt. Yet they are, still, a manifestation of a particular cultural orientation, reflecting a particular system of beliefs and values. Significantly, of course, this is precisely the level at which culture operates—on our attitudes, emotions, beliefs and values. As Galloway (1992) says, "The complex systems of thought and behaviour that people create and perpetuate in and for association are subtle and profound, so elementally forged as to be endowed by their bearers with the attributes of universal truth…." (Galloway, p. 88).

What to do?

Here's a possible solution:

"For good or for bad, we all have biases. We see things in terms of what we know. Education, however, can turn a bias into a perspective that opens the eyes and allows understanding rather than into a blinder that restricts vision and ensures ignorance." (Patrikis, 1988, in Omaggio Hadley, 1993, in Levy 2007).

Culture Literature Review

After a rush to finish up the Padova-Bochum exchange and a month with family in the States, I'm back. Fran and I are making a proposal for a chapter on Culture and CALL in a Calico book on CALL (Calling on CALL, 2006). We've got a lot of work to do and the deadline is August 15th. We've set up the outline and started reading, but while she flies back from I'm doing the background reading for what's been written on Culture since the last edition was published in 2006.

Yesterday's reading was a Perspectives piece from the Modern Language Journal, 2010, on "Revisiting the Role of Culture in the Foreign Language Curriculum". Although it doesn't directly relate to CALL (the only piece really involving technology is Gilberte Furstenberg's), but it helps direct us on what FL academics are saying about culture these days. Yesterday was spending reading and taking notes. I think it would be useful for me to try and summarize my notes/thoughts here.

All the authors seem to discuss:

• we are in a time of changes, transition caused by globalization
• second language learning and culture learning cannot be separated
• culture learning is just as much about one's own culture as it is about de-centering to view other cultures, other perspectives; interconnectedness of one's own culture and other cultures
• they all prefer terms such as intercultural learning or transcultural learning to culture learning
• there should be more interdisciplinary collaboration in institutions, be this CLIL or other ways
• a greater focus on the socio-political importance of FLT and culture
• there’s a trend in education in general towards developing global/intercultural citizens, and language learning and culture clearly play an important role in this. Even in the case of Soliya, where US students are using L1, they need to develop the linguistic skills in their own L1 to effectively negotiate with NNSs of their L1.
• the importance of pragmatics in culture learning
• hypbrid identity, constructing multiple identities, moving back and forth between them and/or merging them towards a new multi-/cross-cultural identity (we may also discuss online identity)
• 
  

Introduction by Heidi Byrnes

• She states that whether or not we acknowledge it, the purposes, contexts and social activity of FL learning and teaching has changed in the past decade. We could argue that social media have played a large role in this.
• She focuses on the three main language documents: the American Standards, the CEFR and the MLA 2007 document. What they all have in common is: an interest in how to integrate culture into FLT, multi-/plurilingualism as a main goal, acknowledgement that the social contexts in which languages are used has changed significantly particularly with globalization and increased access to the Internet.

Michael Byram

• Byram's contribution is basically a sort of 'call to arms'. He points out, which I think we would agree with: "It is often in times of critical societal change that questions about purposes come to the fore, and a tension between “educational” and “functional”/“utilitarian” purposes appears in general debate about schools and society. This distinction is then applied to language learning per se" (Byram, 2007). In other words, it's what I've often stated in recent years: "The evolution of [...] computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is inherently connected to the evolution of technology, and theories on language learning pedagogy intertwined with ways in which society changes" (Guth & Petrucco, 2006).
• "way forward is to turn to education for (democratic) citizenship"
• Byram makes reference to a more recent European document by the Council of Europe, following the CEFR, entitled "Languages in Education, Languages for Education" that focuses particularly on schools, plurilingualism and CLIL. The online document states: "One major challenge for education systems is to give learners, during their school education, language and intercultural competences which will enable them to operate effectively as citizens, acquire knowledge and develop open attitudes to otherness: this vision of the teaching of languages and cultures is referred to as plurilingual and intercultural education."

Katherine Arens

• The most important part of this commentary, for my purposes, is her description and explanation of Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) concept of field, which is a smaller social organization/structure within a society. Given all of the difficulties in defining culture, this term can be helpful. As Arens sums up: "The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1993) used the term to refer to any site or region within which a group acts, communicates, and evolves its characteristic knowledge and identities (see particularly, chapter 1). That site is furnished with a tradition of institutions, group behaviors, pragmatic practices, discourses (verbal and otherwise), ideologies, and a characteristic knowledge base." This seems to fit well with our concept of the online cultures of online communities, be they nespaper forums or gaming websites.
• She adds: "Bourdieu’s (1993) field challenges us to rethink how a language curriculum can become a culture curriculum, addressing not just the language resources available to a “native speaker” (writer, reader) but also a set of interlocking cultural literacies, including the history, traditions, and the pragmatic patterns used by individuals on that field to construct and assert their identities, and to manage their negotiations with infrastructure, the community, and historical norms."
• "[...] we have to teach culture as a multisystem, based only in part on language."
• "the multiliteracies of the field of culture"

Angela Scarino

• Based on her Australian perspective in FLT and policy making, she argues for a shift away from the concept of cultural awareness to intercultural ability.
• She states: "In contrast to this cultural orientation, an intercultural orientation to teaching languages seeks the transformation of students’ identities in the act of learning. This is achieved on the part of students through a constant referencing of the language being learned with their own language(s) and culture(s). In so doing, students decenter from their linguistic and cultural world to consider their own situatedness from the perspective of another."
• Sts. who are 'interculturally able' understand: "their experiential situatedness in their own language and culture, as do all others with whom they communicate" and "they interpret people and the world through the frame of reference of their cumulative experience within their own language and culture."
• She points out that when learning and communicating people interpret and refer to both the self (intracultural) and the other (intercultural)
• At the beginning she claims she will deal with the assessment issue, but ultimately all she offers is the need to combine various forms of assessment, formative and summative.

Gilberte Furstenberg

• In addition to describing Cultura, she very much speaks to language teachers and the importance of making, like in the case of Cultura, FL classes a complete integration of FL and culture learning (even though, she concludes, it's not likely this will ever happen across the board).
• I like this quote and thought it may be an opening one for the chapter as it's what Fran and I always argue when we discuss the importance of online literacies in the framework: "[A] profound change has taken place in the last 10 years: It is the growing realization, brought on by the globalization of our world, that our students will work and interact with people of diverse cultures and will therefore need to be able to communicate effectively across boundaries that are not just linguistic."

Erin Kearney

• Cultural immersion in the FL classroom through narrative.
• Accessing, reading, interpreting, comparing and analyzing narrative, but also producing narrative (particularly from a 1st person persepective) to de-center and put oneself in the other's shoes.
• This is what she says about identity and FL learning: "Identity has in recent years figured prominently in efforts to understand the process of language learning. Work in this vein has emphasized a view of language learners as complex individuals with unique histories and multiple desires for present endeavors and future trajectories, and language learning as a process inherently enmeshed with the negotiation, exploration, and remaking of selves situated in real, imagined, and possible worlds (e.g., Coffey & Street, 2008; Kinginger, 2004, 2008; Norton, 2000; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). "
• She mentions how narrative can be used to help students develop "symbolic competence" (Kramsch, 2006) through varying types of texts (traditional and multimodal) and clear teacher guidance.
• The Danger of the Single Story video by Chimamanda is a very effective narrative to use with students, as we have.

new vocab

Reading these articles I'm see words I've often seen but never made the effort to define, so here goes.

Semiotic

"The distinctive characteristic of human learning is that it is a process of making meaning—a semiotic process; and the prototypical form of human semiotic is language . . . . Whatever the culture they are born into, in learning to speak children are learning a semiotic that has been evolving for at least a thousand generations. … Language is not a domain of knowing; language is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge." (Halliday, 1999: 93–94)

heuristic - (from the free dictionary)

1. Of or relating to a usually speculative formulation serving as a guide in the investigation or solution of a problem: "The historian discovers the past by the judicious use of such a heuristic device as the 'ideal type'" (Karl J. Weintraub).

2. Of or constituting an educational method in which learning takes place through discoveries that result from investigations made by the student.

3. Computer Science Relating to or using a problem-solving technique in which the most appropriate solution of several found by alternative methods is selected at successive stages of a program for use in the next step of the program.

phatic - (from Wikipedia)

In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information.^[1] The term was coined by anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the early 1900s.

For example, "you're welcome" is not intended to convey the message that the hearer is welcome; it is a phatic response to being thanked, which in turn is a phatic whose function is to be polite in response to a gift.

Similarly, in the English language, the question "how are you?" is usually an automatic component of a social encounter. Although there are times when "how are you?" is asked in a sincere, concerned manner and does in fact anticipate a detailed response regarding the respondent's present state, this needs to be pragmatically inferred from context and intonation.

As an example of the former: a simple, basic exchange, shared by many that see each other every day at work, but must fulfill that social obligation each morning, or at first contact:

Speaker one: "What's up?"

Speaker two: "Hey, man, how's it going?"

And each just walks on.

Neither expects an answer to his/her question. Much like a shared nod, it's an indication that each has recognized the other's existence and has therefore performed sufficiently that particular social duty.

The utterance of a phatic expression is a kind of speech act.

In speech communication the term means "small talk" (conversation for its own sake) and has also been called "grooming talking".^[2]

In Roman Jakobson's work, 'Phatic' communication is that which concerns the channel of communication, for instance when one says "I can't hear you, you're breaking up" in the middle of a cell phone conversation. This usage appears in the context of online communities and more specifically on micro-blogging (see for instance ^[3][4]).

deictic - (from Wikipedia)

In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words which have a fixed semantic meaning, but have a denotational meaning that constantly changes depending on time and/or place, are deictic. A word or phrase whose meaning requires this contextual information — for example, English pronouns — is said to be deictic.

Person (pronouns), place (here, this) and time (now)

Lit Review: Part 1

Ok, so I have to get this exposé thing done since it's almost a year since I took leave to do my PhD and over a year since I 'officially' started with Bochum. I had originally thought I'd write a 3-page summary, but then searching the net, found a description of an exposé for Heidelburg written by Andreas indicating it should be 15 pages! That's actually fine, and probably good because it will be more like a one-year 'what I've done' type thing. However, to do this, as suggested by Markus, I really needed to take a good look at what has already been written in the literature. So that's what I've been doing.

The fact is, it takes me quite awhile to read, take notes, etc. When I was in Dusseldorf, I spent a day searching on the net and downloading files. Now I'm going through them. I haven't carefully read through Basharina's work, but she did her PhD on an exchange using ELF, without focusing specifically on ELF, and it was asynchronous and text-based. Then I moved on to the abstracts from the last ELF conference. Lots focused on language-related issues like core English, several others on business-related contexts, and very few, actually none, on telecollaboration, but a few on CMC. So this is where I've gotten so far...

Saw a presentation by Anne Ike. Couldn't find anything on the Web so I wrote to her. She sent me the following article:

• Ife, Anne (2008) Negotiating Variable Proficiency Levels in Lingua Franca English. In: O. Martí Arnándiz and M. Pilar Safont Jordà (eds.) Achieving Multilingualism: Wills and Ways, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Multilingualism (ICOM), pp. 34-47.
• Studies 7 students, 2 NS and 5 ELF, comm. at being, middle and end of a classroom session to look at NS/proficient speaker dominance, turn-taking, etc.The way she counts, carries out research, etc. could be very useful for my study.
• Related to dynamic interpersonal specificity as discussed by Kenning (below).
  

Went back to the ELF abstracts and found an interesting one from Cem Aptelkin. Searched the Web for his name and came up with this:

• Aptelkin, C. (2010) Redefining multicompetence for bilingualism and ELF. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 20(1): 95-110.
• Very recent article that provides a convincing argument for why using ELF in in ESL,EFL teaching contexts is jusfiable and preferable. Makes no explicit reference to any kind of context such as telecollaboration, but his arguments could be used to argue for ELF in telecollaboration.
  

I managed to set up the auth-proxy to get access to online journals through UniPD and so I decided to search IJAL from today back to 2006. Found some articles and downloaded them. The first one I read, I found very useful:

• Kenning, M-M. (2006) Evolving concepts and moving targets: communicative competence and the mediation of communication. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 16(3): 363-388.
• The article is very complex and theoretical, rather than empirical or practical. The author explains: "Approaching the updating of communicative competence from a technological rather than a socio-political perspective, it argues that the conventional notion of what it is to be communicatively competent is predicated on a near equation of communication with face-to-face interaction that has become undermined by the growth in mediated communication of the past decades. Communicative competence must be broadened to accommodate and reflect the many different types of communicational practices around the world (Chapelle 2001: 1–2). (p. 364)".
  

Now on to the next ones!

Forum on Education Abroad

I'm currently, I mean like right now participating 'virtually' in a workshop at the Forum on Education Abroad in Charlotte, NC. Jon Rubin, Director of the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning Center (COIL) at Purchase College kindly asked me to participate together with him for the third time. As I write Jon is showing a video two of the students (one US, one Belarus) in his cross-cultural video course made together. These two students did not share a common language as the Belarussian student had no knowledge of English. All of the communication took place using video and music. Absolutely fascinating - communicating about oneself and one's culture using non-linguistic texts. It's like a discussion forum with no words. This needs to be part of the future of education. "It's really hard to talk about art. It's even harder to talk about your own art. But since you're collaborating, it's even harder to talk about how someone else, who you don't know, influenced your art."

Before Jon, Wayne, Professor of History at Purchase College at SUNY, presented a course he 'transferred' online to collaborate with a university in Turkey. He highlighted that two students who had just come home from study abroad made important contributions, as did two study abroad students in Turkey, and two more students applied to study abroad after taking his course. He ended with a comment on the fact that he believes there need to be more of these international collaborations, but that maybe they should be short, modular courses not worth more than 3 credits, in order to promote more of them. Couldn't agree more - it's kind of the conclusion we've come to in Padova with the whole stage option.

Before Wayne, Craig Little, who I'd already presented with, showed his international course on Social Control. Again, very interesting and what's particularly amazing is the amount of discussion that goes on.

Before that, me. More about that later. Right now they are having a coffee break so I think I might go have one too! It's an honor to work with these people.

Developing International Online Course Collaborations that Build Bridges to Study Abroad

• Jon Rubin, Director, The SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning at Purchase College
• Sarah Guth, English as a Second Language teacher, University of Padua, Italy
• Wayne te Brake, Professor of History, Purchase College at SUNY
• Craig Little, Distinguished Service Professor,Sociology/Anthropology, SUNY Cortland

The online modality is increasingly part of our students’ lives and can become an important addition to international education, if approached thoughtfully. With many of those in international education raising issues regarding the present state of cultural immersion for those studying abroad in the age of Facebook, this workshop will attempt to develop a culturally sensitive response to current online life and will thereby help develop a new vision for education abroad in the 21st Century. Four faculty experienced in globally-networked learning will describe how their students work online with peers in other countries through shared syllabi in an experiential learning environment, and how this engagement has internationalized their classes and led to an increased interest in studying abroad. Each presenter will offer a case study of the course that they developed and taught, followed by an overview of the ways that courses can be linked to and encourage study abroad, the ways that the universities involved have (or have not) chosen to build upon this opportunity, how these courses also function to support faculty development in the area of internationalization, and ways that existing international partnerships can serve as the basis for the development of such courses and the plusses and minuses to this approach. Participants will explore the potential for developing international collaborative courses at their institutions. Prior to the workshop, registrants will be asked to identify potential collaborative courses and partner universities and we will develop these possibilities within the workshop interactively. A social networking web site will be built during the workshop through which workshop participants can stay in touch and continue to develop their courses after the conference.(Registration is closed for this workshop)

Intercultural Dialogue (2)

Telecollaboration as an opportunity for intercultural dialogue:

"The most obvious way to reduce intergroup conflict and prejudice is to increase contacts between members of different groups in such a way as to break down boundaries and build bridges between self-enclosed communities, thereby fostering more complex and personalized views of others’ worlds through knowledge. Such strategies are successful when they meet certain conditions — an equivalent social status, a positive context, an equal knowledgebase and reasonable objectives — while not seeking to solve all social-isolation issues at once (Allport, 1954). While more ambitious goals for reducing social gaps should not be abandoned, the strategy should begin by overcoming cultural boundaries by focusing on the concrete goals at hand. Since the aim is to foster authentic encounter between human beings who, beyond their diff erences, share common expectations, the contact should involve a more intimate dimension and not be seen as merely functional or circumstantial. For it is not so much knowledge of others that conditions the success of intercultural dialogue; rather, it is cognitive fl exibility, empathy, anxiety reduction and the capacity to shift between diff erent frames of reference (Pettigrew, 1998). Humility and hospitality are also crucial: ‘humility because it is impossible to understand another culture totally; and hospitality because one needs to treat other cultures like many traditional societies treat strangers, i.e. with open arms, open minds and open hearts’ (Fasheh, 2007)."

Intercultural Dialogue

Chapter 2

What strikes me in this report is the focus on culture being an individual characteristic rather than one than be ascribed to a nation-state. In other words, we each have our own culture or cultures based on who we 'are' and the 'experiences' we have had. As an American living in Italy I have often described myself as a 'hybrid', but maybe I am no more different than anyone else who lives these multiple identities-multiple cultures. This is the quote from the report that led me to these 'musings'.
"To describe as fault lines the differences between cultures — even those characterized by divergent or opposing beliefs — is to overlook the porosity of cultural boundaries and the creative potential of the individuals they encompass. Civilizations, societies and cultures, like individuals, exist in relation to one another. As one historian has noted, ‘consciously or otherwise [. . .] civilizations observe one another, seek each other out, infl uence one another, mutually defi ne one another. Their founding texts may endure, but they themselves do not remain static’ (Baubérot, 2003). Culture, it has been said, is contagious."

It would be nice to be able to say I am objective and can separate myself from what I'm studying, but if I'm investing time and energy into studying something, there has to be intrinsic motivation (especially considering that the extrinsic motivation in Italy is null!).

Interesting:
"Underlying this multifarious heritage, it is possible to distinguish three main modes of cultural interaction:

1. cultural borrowings,
2. cultural exchanges and
3. cultural impositions ("Yet even in the extreme condition of slavery, discreet processes of reverse enculturation take place and the cultural practices of the dominated populations come to be assimilated by the dominating culture (Bhabha, 1994).")

While ethically distinctive, all these forms of interaction have impacted very significantly, and in many cases very fruitfully, on forms of cultural expression."

Again, how can I as an American living abroad not react to these? Number 2 is what I believe in and what I do. Numbers 1 and 3 what I hate about the influence of America abroad.

Multiple Identities
"Today globalization, international trade and the rise of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the media are making for more systematic encounters, borrowings, juxtapositions and cultural exchanges. Yet this new degree of mutual receptiveness among cultures will not place them on an equal footing if we do not begin to rethink our shared cultural categories. The transcultural ties that manifest themselves across the complex interplay of multiple identities are potentially powerful facilitators of intercultural dialogue. Irrespective of the stances adopted by the various parties, or their identifi cation with the particular culture of which they believe themselves to be the ‘representatives’, the acceptance of multiple identities shifts the focus away from ‘differences’ and towards our shared capacity to interact and to accept encounters, coexistence and even cohabitation between diff erent cultures."
"Indeed, as illustrated by opinion surveys such as the World Values Survey (see Table 6 in the Statistical Annex), when individuals are asked to which geographical groups they feel they belong, in many countries in the world they declare multiple identities (see Figure 2.1)."

How to promote cultural dialogue: (Schoefthaler, 2006)

1. Traditional modalities of dialogue between cultures, developed over the past decade, have largely failed because of their almost exclusive focus on what cultures and religions have in common. The present crisis calls for dialogue on differences and diversity.
2. The lack of mutual knowledge about sensitive issues linked to religions and any other belief is obvious. This gap needs to be filled as a matter of urgency. Information on religious pluralism needs to be provided at all levels of formal and non-formal education, in a terminology that is not faith-loaded but accessible to people maintaining diversifi ed beliefs and opinions. This information must include difficult concepts, such as what is ‘sacred’, ‘holy’ or ‘insulting’.
3. Too often, dialogue events have stressed collective identities (national, ethnic,religious) rather than identities of individuals or social groups. Dialogue fora composed of ‘representatives’ of religious or ethnic groups are counter-productive and contribute to the clash of civilizations scenario rather than preventing it. Dialogue between cultures must create space for mutual perception and appreciation of overlapping, multiple and dynamic cultural identities of every individual and social or cultural group.
4. [...]
5. Active tolerance, involving mutual respect, needs to be promoted rather than mere acceptance of diversity.

"Just as it can provoke a retreat into separate identities, cultural diversity can also be experienced as an invitation to discover the other. It is somewhat misleading to speak of cultures in this context, however, for, in reality, it is not so much cultures as people — individuals and groups, with their complexities and multiple allegiances — who are engaged in the process of dialogue. To be eff ective, intercultural dialogue must free itself of the concept of exclusive and fi xed identities and embrace a worldview predicated on pluralism and multiple affiliations."

Intercultural Competencies
"Defined as the ‘complex of abilities needed to perform eff ectively and appropriately
when interacting with those who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself’ (Fantini, 2007), these abilities are essentially communicative in nature, but they also involve reconfi guring our perspectives and understandings of the world."
"Various strategies exist for acquiring intercultural competencies and facilitating cultural encounters in the promotion of intercultural dialogue (Bennett, 2009).
[...] The ultimate goal would be that intercultural competencies become an indispensable element of school curricula within a larger framework of cultural literacy training (see chapter 4)."

In an intercultural encounter, basic capacities include the ability to listen, dialogue and wonder. Eberbard, 2008