Culture & SLA - Week 4 - Cultural Practices and Perspectives

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 4 of the course Culture and Second Language Aquisition. In this class we discuss the practices and perspectives of culture from Moran's book and analzye the products, practices, and perspectives of Costa Rican culture through the eyes of an outsider. 

Today's Goals:

• Outline the linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic features of a cultural practice.
• Explore the insights about cultural practices and perspectives from the point of view of an outsider in my culture.
• Contrast broad cultural perspectives with my own individual perspectives.

Task 1: Folk Remedies

Many cultures have a rich and detailed repertoire of products and practices related to traditional folk remedies for common physical ailments. These products and practices are informed by cultural perspectives about the causes of illness and what keeps a person healthy. In this activty you will explore some of the folk remedies of your own local and family culture. 

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE
• Group 4: CLICK HERE
• Group 5: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Sharing Your Summaries

Your task this week was to read Chapters 6 and 7 in Moran's book and write a summary of the most important concepts. Take 15 minutes with your group members to explore your summaries. Share what you wrote with your partners and why it was significant to you. Then complete the synthesis document as a group. 

Synthesis Document:

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE
• Group 4: CLICK HERE
• Group 5: CLICK HERE

Theory Break: Cultural Practices

• “Practices are organized and implemented in preordained ways according to the expectations of members of the culture. They involve a linguistic dimension (written or spoken language), and extralinguistic dimension (paralanguage and nonverbal language), manipulation of products, and specific social circumstances, and often occur in particular physical settings or places (p. 59).”

• “Operations describe practices that involve manipulation of cultural artifacts. Acts are specific communicative functions with both linguistic and extralinguistic features. Scenarios are practices enacted in specific social situations, involving operations, acts and other sets of specific practices. Lives are sets of practices organized by individuals through the ways they live their lives in the culture (p. 59.”

Task 3: Exploring Cultural Acts

Click your group link below to explore the linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic features of common cultural practices. 

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE
• Group 4: CLICK HERE
• Group 5: CLICK HERE

Theory Break: Perspectives

• “Perspectives are the explicit and implicit meanings shared by members of the culture, manifested in products and practices. These meanings reflect members’ perceptions of the world, the beliefs and values that they hold, and the norms, expectations, and attitudes that they bring to practices. To name the perspectives that underlie practices is to answer the question, “Why do the people of this culture do things in the way they do (p. 74)?”

• Perceptions: What we perceive, what we ignore; waht we notice or disregard
• Beliefs: What we hold to be true or untrue
• Values: What we hold to be right/wrong, good/evil, desirable/undesireable, proper/improper, normal/abnormal, appropriate
• Attitudes: Our mental and affective dispositions - our frame of mind, our outlook - charged with feeling or emotion

• “Understanding perspectives, in my opinion, represents the most challenging aspect of teaching culture. The task, simply put, is to identify the perceptions, values, beliefs, and attitudes of the culture. However, culture consists of numerous communities, all coexisting under the same umbrella of national culture…some of them are in opposition – sometimes in open conflict… Given shifting points of view, how can language teachers hope to offer accurate explanations of cultural perspectives (p. 83).”

Task 5: My Culture from an Outsider's Perspective

Reflect on the reading "The Autobus Diaries" and describe the following cultural features that were present in the man's experiences.

• Cultural Practices
• Cultural Perspectives
• Cultural Persons and Communities
• Cultural Products

Task 4: Reflecting on Cultural Perspectives

Cultural perspectives are hard to describe because certain generalizations must be made that cannot take into account the differences in perspectives at an individual level.  Read the following article with your partners and discuss the reflection prompts.

• Fatalism - Cultural Perspectives: CLICK HERE

References:

Isenberg, R. (2015). The Green Season: A Writer's First Year in Costa Rica. The Tico Times Publications Group. 

Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture: Perspectices in Practice. Heinle, Cengage Learning.