Cultural Awareness

Kuma’s chapter “Ensuring Social Relevance” was about Standard English and the use of L1 vs L2. One time last semester, I took my conversation partner to a speaker about education. When the speech began, we quickly learned that English was the speaker’s L2. He was from India and my conversation partner was from Korea. I could barely understand him, and I knew that she couldn’t. This brings up the question, should ELLs be taught in Standard English? I feel that they would benefit from it, but not to the point of totally excluding exposure to other dialects. Non-natives varieties are present in the English-speaking world and people need to acknowledge them and not see them as less valuable. When that happens, it’s degrading because language is part of identity. This also applies to L2 use in the classroom. However, many times teachers don’t know how to speak the L1 of the students and the parents of the students don’t want it spoken to their children. But, the student will feel more valuable if the teacher connects the classroom activities to the student’s home language and/or culture.

Raising cultural consciousness is important in the classroom so that students know more than just the society in which they live. The first day of classes at the ELI, I had my students make bucket lists of what they want to accomplish at in class, ISU, and their lives in general. All of them stated that they wanted to learn about the cultures of others. How many Americans have you heard that have said something like that? My guess is not many. It’s refreshing to be around people who appreciate cultures other then their own. The chapter states that, “there is no one culture that embodies all and only the best of human experience”. So much value is given to the American culture that I fear it’s gone to people’s heads. There’s a difference between patriotism and ignorance and I hope that people become more knowledgeable about other cultures.

An interesting section in Brown’s chapter “Teachers for Social Responsibility” was Hot Topics in the Language Classroom. In general, I encourage raising student awareness about controversial issues so that students can be mindful of what is going on around them. However, my opinions on it were challenged when it happened to me in the classroom. During a class at the ELI, we were having an unexpected talk about religion. It was a learning experience for everyone so I told my students that we could continue the discussion at a later time. For the next time we met, I had prepared an article for the students to read about women’s role in religion. Right before class, a student asked me not to bring up religion in class because of differing religious views. I had a back-up article, so we analyzed that instead. When she asked me not to talk about religion, I wondered if it was something that I shouldn’t have brought up in the first place. After reading the chapter, I now know that it depends on the way in which I bring up controversial topics. How should I have presented the topic of religion in class? As the chapter title indicates, it is our job to teach about issues such as these. By choosing to be teachers, we are agents for change.

My paper is going to be about culture and rhetorical strategy in ELL writing. Originally, it was just going to be about how to teach writing, but after meeting with Dr. Seloni, she helped me tie in culture to how to teach writing, which is a large factor in how ELLs write. I will be using Contrastive Rhetoric: Reaching to Intercultural Rhetoric. The article is about how Intercultural Rhetoric builds on notions of the importance of difference based on culture and language in ESL writing patterns, but incorporates a more dynamic and pluralistic perspective on cultures and writing structures. A Comparison of English and Farsi Rhetoric and its Impact on English Writing of Iranian Students by Sasan Baleghizadeh and Azar Pashaii shows that there are significant differences in the use of these three elements between native speakers and Iranian students. It is argued that this is due to different thought patterns between the two languages claimed by Kaplan’s (1966) contrastive rhetoric. Lastly, Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Basic Technical Writing Course: A Survey of Our Current Practices and Methods by Natalia Matveeva provides some suggestions for addressing the challenges and enriching a technical writing curriculum.