Culture and SLA - Week 6 -  Cultural Communities and Persons

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 6 of the course Culture and Second Language Acquisition for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIIC0 2023. This week we will consider the final two components of Moran's Dimensions, cultural communities and cultural persons, but first we will wrap up our exploration of cultural perspecives by considering the work of the researchers conducting the World Values Survey. 

Today's Goals:

• Discuss the role of schools as acculturation institutions for transmitting dominant cultural values.
• Identify our broad and narrow cultural community affiliations and requirements for membership.
• Discuss how our avowed and ascribed identitites inform the ways we present ourselves to others.

Guiding Questions: 

• What roles do institutions play in transmitting cultural values?
• How does the consideration of cultural communities add complexity to the analysis of regional or national culture?
• Do I consider myself to be a "typical" representative of my culture?

Theory Break: Cultural Values

• Moran identifies four categories of cultural perspectives (perceptions, beliefs, values, and attitudes) which he organizes in a continuum from tacit to explict. The most explicit category of perspectives are attitudes which are "visibly manifested in practices (p. 77)." On the far end of the spectrum are perceptions, the least visible category of perspectives.

• Perceptions: What we perceive, what we ignore; what we notice or disregard

• Beliefs: What we hold to be true or untrue

• Values: What we hold to be right/wrong, good/evil, desirable/undesirable, proper/improper, normal/abnormal, appropriate

• Attitudes: Our mental and affective dispositions - our frame of mind, our outlook - charged with feeling or emotion

Task 1: World Values Survey

The World Values Survey is a massive international research project that began in 1981. It consists of an extensive survey of the value orientations of individuals around the world in order to produce country level results. The survey seeks to contrast countries on two separate value dimensions or scales.

• Traditional Values vs Rational-Secular Values (y axis)
• Survival Values vs Self-Expression Values (x axis)

This allows the researchers to place countries in a coordinate system which creates a visual way to easily compare, contrast, and group different countries. Also, by comparing survey results of different years, researchers can chart how the values of a specific country change over time.

• Exploring Traditional vs Rational Values Axis 
• CLICK HERE

• Exploring Survival vs Self-Expression Values
• CLICK HERE

Inglehart-Welzel World Culture Map

Task 2: Culture Map Analysis

Click the picture to view the full resolution image and discuss the questions below.

• Explore the map, which countries can you find at the extremes of each value dimension (axis)?
• What catches your attention about the way the countries cluster by geographic and socio-historical cultural regions?
• Where do you think Costa Rica would fall on this map? (WVS plans to include CR in the next value survey.)

Now watch the video that shows how these cultural areas have shifted over the last 40 years through different maps that have been created based on the survey results since it began in 1981. Discuss the questions below the video.

• Do you notice any general trends among the countries in the Latin American region?
• Watch the video again. This time focus your attention on France. How does this country's values orientation shift through the decades?
• Watch the video again. This time focus your attention on Mexico. How does this country's values orientation shift through the decades? What might explain this variation?

• Insights and Hypotheses: CLICK HERE

Task 3: 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 4: Reading Response Discussion - Cultural Communities and Persons

Let's transition into a new topic by reviewing the contents and sharing some of your responses from this week's study guide. Read the information below and respond to the prompts.

• What are Communities?: "Communities consist of the specific groups of the culture in which members, through different kinds of interpersonal relationships, carry out practices in specific social and physical settings (p. 90)."

• Broad: Communities can be large and general.
• Nation
• Language
• Gender
• Race
• Religion
• Socioeconomic Class
• Region
• Generation

• Narrow: Communities can be much more specific.
• Workplace
• Neighborhood
• School Association
• Local Political Party
• Religious Social Club
• Sports Team
• Charity Organization
• Co-workers
• Family

• Prompt: What community memberships do you have that immediately come to mind? What defines your membership to that community? What shared practices, perspectives, etc. do you have?

• What's the Relationship between Communities and Social Institutions?: "At the broadest level, the social institutions of the culture define communities and accompanying practices for everyone within the borders of the national culture. Economic, political, educational, health, and other institutions exist for members of the national culture as a whole. Accordingly, these institutions establish and maintain many practices that members of the culture need to enact in order to go about a large part of their daily lives (p. 91)."

• Community Dominance: "The social institutions of the culture and its systems tend to reflect the dominant cultural communities, that is, those groups that have the most influence (p. 91)."

• Prompt: In your study guide you were asked to think of a social institution in Costa Rica and say how it determines certain cultural practices for members of the national culture. What example did you write?

• How do Communities Interact?: "Co-existing communities, in other words, are in relationship with one another in the national culture. They may be physically isolated from one another, or they may exist next to one another but be separate, with no interaction between them. They may have a harmonious collaborative relationship or they may oppose one another, possibly in open conflict (p. 93)."

• Terminology: The relationship between different cultural communites has been described using these terms: 

• Microcultures inside a Macroculture
• Co-Cultures inside a Dominant Culture

• The Macroculture or Dominant Culture can also be referred to as:

• Mainstream Culture
• Umbrella Culture
• Core Culture

• Prompt: One of the challenges for teachers of culture is to avoid generalizations when teaching about cultural perspectives. If national cultures are composed of multiple independent, co-existing, competing, and conflicting communities with a range of cultural perspectives, we can't express anything meaningful about perspectives without presenting multiple, often contradictory points of view. Can you think of any conflicting perspectives or practices held by different communities in Costa Rica?

• What is a Discourse Community?:"Linguist James Gee calls these communities Discourses as a way of emphasizing the social practices they carry out: ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing. Gee contentds that individuals are members of many Discourses and that each one calls for a distinct set of practices for membership, what he calls an identity kit (p. 93)."

• Interpersonal Relationships: "The important point here is that relationships are practiced according to the cultural perspectives that underlie practices in these communities. Strangers, acquaintances, friends, romantic partners, rivals, enemies, family members, and group based relationships are all defined accordingly. In simple terms, you relate to people according to the norms, the unwritten rules, of that particular community (p. 93)."

• Prompt: Click the link below. On the first page list some of your community memberships then move to the second page and discuss the questions regarding membership. Remember Gee's quote about discourses and the identity tool kit.
  
  
  • Group Link: CLICK HERE

Theory Break: Cultural Persons - Our Identity(ies) as Cultural Beings

• "Culture resides in persons, in individuals. Each member of a culture, like a miniscule twist in a kaleidoscope, refracts and reflects the common colored lights of their culture in a unique display, recognizably similar yet unquestionably different (Moran, p. 98).”

• "When we enter another culture and participate in its practices, we do this through our interactions with individuals, with the people of the culture."

• "As outsiders, our initial tendency is to see similarities among personas and to assume that they are representative of their culture, that they are 'typically' Japanese, Chinese, or Spanish. Yet as we get to know these persons, we begin to discern the differences, the idiosynchracies, the quirks, the personalities, the special characteristics that set them off from others in their culture."

• “Like other aspects of culture, identity is both explicit and tacit. There are aspects of ourselves that we can describe or put into words and there are others that we cannot express, or that are simply outside of our awareness. Not until we find ourselves in situations where our sense of self – our values, beliefs, practices – is called into question do we perceive the tacit dimensions of our identity (Moran, p. 99).”

• Exploring our avowed and ascribed identities: CLICK HERE

•  “When students whose first language is not English first encounter the learning of English as an additional language, they cannot really avoid the issue of learner identity (be it imposed, assumed, and/or negotiated) because they must participate in a community different than what they are used to (Farrell, p. 33).”

• “Throughout their careers teachers construct and reconstruct (usually tacitly) a conceptual sense of who they are (their self-image), and this is manifested through what they do (their professional role identity) (Farrell, p. 34).”

References:

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