Culture & SLA - Week 5 - More on Cultural Perspectives
Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 5 of the course Culture and Second Language Aquisition. In this class we discuss more ideas related to cultural perspectives including Hofstede's dimensions of culture, cultures in conflict, and the creation of a national cultural identity.
Today's Goals:
- Explore how our various social institutions contribute to the creation of a national culture.
- Use Hofstede's 6 Cultural Dimensions to analyze the culture of Costa Rica at a national level.
- Comment on the cultural perspectives from last week's reading.
Guiding Questions:
- How do social institutions contribute to the creation of a national cultural identity?
- How can Hofstede's Dimensions provide additional insight into the nature of culture?
Extra: Folk Remedies Part 2
Last week we began by exploring cultural practices and persepctives about health by idenitfying traditional folk remedies for common ailments. Since many of you brought up ideas related to "pega", I was curious to learn if there were perspectives and practices in other countries in Latin America. I asked a friend from Guatemala and Dominican Republic and here is what they told me.
As you listen, identify similarities and differences between the products, practices, persons, and perspectives.
Task 1: Semantic Map: School Operations, Acts, and Scenarios
School is a cultural product, specifically, a place and institution, that serves as the location for many cultural practices. Create a semantic map of different cultural practices associated with school. For our purposes, please focus your map on primary school.
- Operations: Manipulation fo cultural products by individual members of the culture
- Acts: Ritualized communicative practices involving other people
- Scenarios: Extended communicative practices that involve a series of interactions, including operations and acts. They follow an expected sequence of practices within a particular settings and social circumstances.
Semantic Maps:
- Group 1: CLICK HERE
- Group 2: CLICK HERE
- Group 3: CLICK HERE
- Group 4: CLICK HERE
- Group 5: CLICK HERE
Theory Break: National Culture
“It boils down to this: Culture perspectives depend on your point of view. Given shifting points of view, how can langauge teachers hope to offer accurate descriptions of cultural perspectives (Moran, p. 83)?"
"The working solution I propose is to present alternative vewpoints as part of knowing why, or discovering interpretations. In simple terms, these can be defined respectively as culture as a unified whole culture as distinct communities, and culture as competing communities (p 84)."
Functionalist: Takes the broad view of culture, most often at the national level, using the nation as the focal point.
Interpretive: Does not address the notion of a national culture community. All culture, in the interpretive view, is local.
Conflict: Accepts that each community has its own perspectives but does not assume harmonious relationships among them, rather, they are in competition, struggling for influence, power, or control over the core institutions of society.
Task 2: Schools as Acculturation Institutions
Institutions like school are cultural products. However, they are very special products because they serve the purpose of promoting cultural practices and perspectives and they help to create a shared sense of national cultural identity. Watch this video clip documenting some of the daily routines in a typical elementary school in Japan and answer the questions below.
- What were some of the routines?
- What was similar and different to your own elementary school experience?
- How do these practices give you insight into Japanese cultural perspecitves (perceptions, beliefs, values, attitudes)?
- How do practices in Costa Rican elementary schools promote cultural perspectives and contribute to a shared sense of national identity?
Morning Routine in the US
Variations by School and Region
Task 3: Cultural Perspectives: Insights from National Symbols
Symbols of national culture can give insights about broad underlying cultural perspectives. These are examples of emic perspectives, ways that insiders in the culture view themselves. Let's take a moment to analyze cultural imagery connected to values, beliefs, and attitudes from the national anthems of the United States and Costa Rica.
- US Anthem: CLICK HERE
- Group 1: CLICK HERE
- Group 2: CLICK HERE
- Group 3: CLICK HERE
- Group 4: CLICK HERE
- Group 5: CLICK HERE
Theory Break: Hofestede's Dimensions
- “In the 1970’s (Hofstede) ... got access to a large survey database about values and related sentiments of people in over 50 countries around the world. These people worked in the local subsidiaries of one large multinational corporation: IBM (Hofstede, p. 6)."
- "The database contained more than 100,000 questionnaires. Initial analyses of the database at the level of individual respondents proved confusing, but a breakthrough occurred when the focus was directed at correlations between mean scores of survey items at the level of countries. Patterns of correlation at the country level could be strikingly different from what was found at the individual level (p. 6)."
- Hofstede began noticing trends among members of certain countries when he controled for different demographic variables leading him to discover and describe 6 cultural dimensions which function like scales. Countries can fall somewhere on each scale between two extreme perspectives. Hofstede is emphatic that this model should only be used to describe cultures at the national level based on statistical trends in large data sets. There are considerable variations at the individual level when it comes to cultural perspectives.
Task 3: Charting Costa Rica's Dimensions
Click the link below and go to your group tab. Organize the table for your assigned dimension and discuss how this relates to Costa Rica at a national level.
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. You read a book chapter analyzing cultural perspectives in Costa Rica. Let's wrap up the class by sharing your reactions to it.
- Reaction: What are your immediate reactions to what you read? To what degree did the authors get it right? What did they miss? What did they overgeneralize or inaccurately describe or interpret?
- Analysis: Can you use Moran’s framework of cultural perspectives (described on page 77 of Chapter 7) to identify specific examples of perceptions, beliefs, values, and attitudes present in the reading or additional ones that you can identify in Costa Rican culture?
- Response: The perspectives presented in this reading represent generalizations of Costa Rican cultural perspectives from a national level. However, there is always considerable variation in perspectives among individual members of the culture. In what ways do the perspectives presented in the article match your own perspectives? To what degree? In what ways do they not match your own perspectives?
References:
Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1014
Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture: Perspectices in Practice. Heinle, Cengage Learning.
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