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.