Post #7

            The sections from the Holliday textbook were all about the media and the role it has in creating and confirming stereotypes and cultural misunderstandings. The first section talked about the issues that can arise when you have refugees in your class. I never thought about this possibility before now. Reza, a refugee from Afghanistan, appeared to be “unable to deal with the requirements of western society” according to his teacher. He refused to talk about his culture and seemed to resent females who were in positions of power, such as his teacher and the nurse. A year later, the teacher ran into him again and she noticed he was different. Reza explained how his anger during her class was due to many factors, especially being in a new country when is all he wanted to do was go back home. The teacher kept mentioning things that she thought explained his behavior, like the idea that most women in Afghanistan aren’t teachers and also the idea that there aren’t any decent hospitals in Afghanistan. These ideas are mainly because of what is portrayed on the media, which is another way that cultural misunderstandings can come about. Afghanistan is a good example since is all we see on TV about the country has to do with the war zones. Before reading this section, I didn’t even think about the media playing a hand in creating and confirming cultural stereotypes.

            In another section in Holliday, the media is also discussed. Chomsky states that “the news media provides us with is very narrow, very tightly contained, and grotesquely inaccurate account of the world in which we live” (195). I find this quote to be very contradicting but extremely true. I find it contradicting because the news is supposed to be accurate since it is our only means of knowing what is going on in the world. Also, the news is shown in such a confident way that it makes it look like they know exactly what they’re talking about, which we don’t know what else to believe so we just go off of what we hear from them. This same section also discusses the “New Racism” that has formed. This New Racism represents the idea that instead of minorities being “biologically inferior,” they are labeled as being different. The forms of this New Racism are discursive, which means that they are “expressed, enacted, and confirmed by text and talk.” This means that this New Racism has spread through the conversations that everyday people have. Something else that I thought was interesting in this section is the table that shows the frequency of cartooning characteristics.

            The article by Taylor-Mendes is about a study on how the images in textbooks which represent English culture, have an effect on teachers’ and students’ impressions of the culture of the foreign language they are learning. According to the article, this is a topic that there has been very little research on. The images in textbooks “define who is included or excluded from an advantaged societal position based, at least in part, on race.” I find it interesting that the author asked the EFL students who they picture as being the “ideal subject” of an English speaker and what characteristics this person has. This makes me wonder what speakers of other languages picture when they think of a native English speaker. Do they picture an American? Someone who is British, or maybe Australian? The English textbooks ask this question of the EFL students over and over again, through the images that are put on the pages. A concern is that these images reinforce certain racial biases. The article states that all of the 15 participants are among the wealthiest 20% of the population. This is because in Brazil, the opportunity to learn English for business or travel is only given to those who are privileged. I think that it is sad that not everyone can chose to learn English even if they really want to, especially since it is such a widely spoken language.

Post #5

            The narrative that Kubota wrote about the teacher named Barbara was interesting to me since it was fictional but still included a lot of important information. Before Kubota goes into the story about Barbara, she explains the difficulties that arise when ESL students have to write in English since our culture and other cultures emphasize different things in writing. The most differences lie between the US and East Asia. The US values individualism, creativity, and critical thinking whereas East Asian countries value the opposite: collectivism and respect for authority. Atkinson’s argues that “critical thinking is a social practice unique to western culture traditions” which is why we need to stay away from putting emphasis on it (11). This is interesting since we have always been taught that the ability to think critically is something that we acquire as we grow up and that it is important. In my psychology 302 class we just talked about how critical thinking is an important stage in the adolescent period. I never knew that critical thinking was unique to our culture.

            During the narrative, Barbara, a writing teacher, “experiences various understandings of cultural differences” (13). Kubota states that the goal of the narrative is to inspire teachers to look further into this issue. During the narrative, Barbara talks to her friend Carol who describes Kaplan’s idea that we discussed the other week in class about the use of lines to represent the different types of languages. Barbara’s ESL students are Asian so one of their main difficulties with being able to write efficiently in English was the idea of individualism versus collectivism. Fox makes the point that teachers need to recognize and respect cultural differences in their students and also that students shouldn’t abandon their own culture, but instead should just “acquire new cultural conventions.” When Barbara meets David, he explains the the difference between the essentialist and collectivist points of view on culture. I’m guessing that the collectivist position is the same as the non-essentialist view since they sound the same, viewing culture as produced. Barbara realizes that having her students compare their own culture and the American culture, she was viewing culture from the essentialist point of view and in the process was beginning to create stereotypes. But I personally don’t see how comparing two different cultures and discussing the differences and similarities between the two is creating stereotypes. I talk about the differences and similarities between the US and Spain all the time, but I’m not creating stereotypes since the things that I am talking about are observations that I made while I was there. One thing that I did not like about the use of the narrative by Kubota was that she also included formal terms and ideas in the story which in a way made it difficult to understand and focus on the story.

            The other article by Kubota also goes into the differences between writing in the west and writing in the east and how the focus of writing differs for each of these two cultures. The author discussed the different things that ESL students bring to a classroom. The article talks about Japanese culture and American culture, and how Japanese culture is seen as “traditional, homogeneous, and group oriented with a strong emphasis on harmony” (11). Whereas in the US, or western culture, more of an emphasis is put on individualism, self-expression, and critical thinking. What I found most interesting about this article were the questions that the author asked at the end. By looking as the questions, she seems to question whether the way in which she presented some of the material about Japanese culture will deliver the correct message.

The article by Connor explains the type of writing called contrastive rhetoric perspective and shows different examples that demonstrate the use of it. He uses examples of job application letters to show this type of writing. Contrastive rhetoric perspective helps identify the problems with writing that second language learners have by analyzing the strategies they use in their first language. This method is almost backward but it makes sense since some of the problems students have with writing in English could be due to how they write or speak in their first language. An example that I can relate to has to do with comparing Spanish and English. In English, when we speak/write we put the adjective describing the noun before the noun, but in Spanish it is the opposite, the adjective goes after the noun. Students who are first learning Spanish tend to forget this concept since they translate directly from English into Spanish and will put the adjective before the noun when writing/speaking in Spanish when it should be the other way around. Their mistake makes sense though since it is explained by their first language.   

Post #4

            The reading from Holliday is about how people can be misled by their own preconceptions and how that can lead to Othering, which is when a group of people is perceived as being different. The book talks about how it is important that we understand people before we communicate with them. The story about John and his Amish neighbors is an example of the use of a stereotype. John assumed that since the Smith family is Amish and that they don’t own a TV that they wouldn’t ever want to watch TV. He was surprised when the entire family agreed to come over and watch the news that night. The textbook says that it is natural to form stereotypes because it helps us to understand different cultures. I, along with most other people, was always taught in school about how it isn’t a good thing to form stereotypes because they’re usually not true. The text then goes on to say how forming stereotypes can sometimes be a bad thing since they can turn into prejudice and then eventually turn into Othering.  In the following section is the example of Agnes who is on a tour in North Africa with other Europeans. This story is an example to show how when people from different cultures meet, something called a “middle culture of dealing” is put into place when people from the different cultures interact with one another. It’s almost as if a new culture is created when the people communicate since both cultures are blended and there are compromises being made. When I studied in Spain, my roommates and I traveled to Italy for a week and stayed in a hostel. While staying at the hostel, we met many new people from several different countries. In a way, the interactions that we had with the people we met were set in a “middle culture of dealing.” We met a girl from Brazil who spoke Portuguese as a first language but we communicated with her in Spanish, her second language and ours as well, since none of us spoke Italian even though we were in Italy. Our “middle culture of dealing,” or our compromise we used in order to communicate, was speaking in Spanish with one another even though that was neither of our first languages.

            Chapter five by Kumaravadiveluk is about cultural assimilation. The author describes the Unite States as “a nation of immigrants.” Over the years, the culture, politics, and economy of our country has been changed and expanded due to the many waves of immigrants. Kuma describes the four separate waves of immigration and the idea of America being seen as a “melting pot.” This analogy reflects the concern of being able to find a common identity with so many different people coming from different backgrounds. The author discusses how the ideal of the melting pot is different from the reality of what it actually was. The process of creating a “melting pot” required the immigrants to assimilate to the beliefs, practices, and values of the mainstream community. As we discussed on the first day of class, some people say that the US is now seen more as a “mixed salad” instead of a melting pot. I have to agree with this idea since there are so many small communities of other cultures all over the US, for example, Chinatown and Little Village in Chicago. There are so many people living in the US that have different cultures that haven’t exactly assimilated to life in America, but just created their own community within the country.

            The other article by Kumaravadiveluk talks about cultural stereotypes that are associated with students from Asia. One of the stereotypes that the author discusses is the idea that Asian students don’t take part in classroom discussions because of their culture. Kuma says that this is not true and that the real reason is because they have a lack of confidence in speaking English and they have a fear of making mistakes. This reminded me of the story about Zhang, the Chinese student, who said the reason he didn’t participate was because of Confucianism.   

Post #3: Identity

            The assigned reading in the text by Holliday is about the different factors that go into determining someone’s identity and how much of a person’s identity is tied to how they speak or write. Looking at narratives is a way to demonstrate or determine someone’s identity. The reason why is because “when we speak or write, we always take a particular perspective on what the ‘world’ is like” (101). When we write our trajectory papers for this class we will be writing a type of narrative that will show a part of our identity. In my opinion, using a narrative to describe who we are makes sense since so much of who we are is because of the experiences that we have had in our lives. As the quote says, when people speak and write about their experiences, they demonstrate their personal view of the world. This perspective of the world includes factors such as what we believe to be “normal,” “acceptable,” or “real.” I agree that if another person was to listen to or read an account of someone’s experiences they would know the person to a certain extent but I don’t think that they would know their entire identity. A person’s identity is so much more than experiences and spoken words it is also how the person perceives and reacts to these experiences and conversations. People’s actions, how they think and interact, depends on the situation that they are in. There are behaviors that are considered appropriate for certain situations. For example, a person doesn’t act the same way during school and when they’re with their friends outside of school. According to Gee, these are called “Discourses.” “Discourses” are “socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting, in the right places at the right times with the right objects” (106).

            Chapter two by Hall describes the different understandings there are of cultural identity and the connection that it has to culture and language use. The author talks about how culture is treated as being separate from language and the idea that individuals can demonstrate their own culture but that it does not necessarily inhabit them. Individuals can reflect their own culture but don’t actually define culture themselves. Hall uses the idea of a cloak to create a metaphor about cultural identity. She describes cultural identity as being a cloak that people can put on or take off (32). I think that using a cloak to describe this complex concept of cultural identity is a good idea since it explains how people can either choose to show their own culture or not. Hall also talks about social identity in this chapter. She describes someone’s social identity, or their belongingness to a group, as having two different layers. The first layer of someone’s social identity is established when we are born, we are automatically members of several different social groups such as gender (male or female), race, religion, and socioeconomic status (low, middle, or high class). The second layer of a person’s social identity is determined by the individual since it “develops through our involvement in various activities of the social institutions that comprise our communities” (32). This is an interesting way to look at someone’s social identity. It didn’t even occur to me that some parts of our identity we don’t necessarily get to choose. But this doesn’t mean that someone’s social identity cannot change over time since that is what was described with a story in the article by Norton. In the story about Eva, who immigrated to Canada without speaking English, over time her conception of herself as an immigrant changed as she began seeing herself as a “multicultural citizen.”