“Communication does not take
place in a vacuum. All
communication takes place in a social setting or environment. We call this the context because the
setting is never neutral; it always has some impact on how the participants
behave. The classroom environment
is one of these settings that specifically influences intercultural
interaction. The rules,
assumptions, values, customs, practices, and procedures of a given culture
strongly affect the conduct of classroom activity.”
Larry
Samovar & Richard Porter --
Intercultural Communications: A Reader
Effective Teaching In A Cross-Cultural Setting
Every teacher has his
or her own style of teaching, there are different national and cultural academic
traditions, and there are often cultural differences in pedagogy. But regardless of styles, traditions and
cultures, all good teaching anywhere in the world consists of one thing – making
connections.
Cognitive
neuroscience, educational psychology and our years of practical teaching
experience all tell us that good teaching consists of bringing about knowledge
and skills in students by making connections between the new things that we are
trying to teach them and their existing information base and repertoire of
skills. In a Piagetian perspective
students build and expand upon schemas through accomodation and
assimilation. And, from a
Vygotskian point of view, students advance fully into their zone of proximal
development through the assistance of parents, teachers and peers.
The Need For
Cognitive, Motivational & Behavioral Supports
Effective teaching
requires the use of cognitive, motivational and behavioral supports. And where the language of instruction is
the students’ second language, good teaching also requires considerable
linguistic supports as well.
Teachers must utilize and build these supports into their courses,
methods of classroom instruction and overall interaction with students.
For example,
linguistic supports consist of an adjustment of the teacher’s language which
includes slowing down the pace at which you explain material, simplifying your
English a little and keeping away from slang, jargon and idiomatic expressions,
and in general controlling your vocabulary and keeping to familiar words which
you’ve already defined. It is
also helpful to either preview key vocabulary before a lecture or unit or else
to stop and define words as you go along.
When you are lecturing or explaining it is a good practice to constantly
repeat, sum things up and then repeat them again. And lastly it is important to ensure
that the volume of your voice is loud enough for students to hear.
Cognitive supports
consist of providing the students with adequate cognitive frameworks upon which
the new information and skills can be attached in their minds. This includes the use of advance
organizers such as outlines, models, concept maps and other graphic organizers
whether they are in the form of handouts, overhead transparencies or just
writing and drawing on the board.
It also includes making things more concrete in the beginning and then
moving toward the abstract and this is greatly facilitated by using more
audiovisual elements for teaching.
Movies, slides, textbook illustrations and photographs and CD-ROMs are
very effective. In general, it is
important to be sensitive to student cognitive processes. We must know our students’ fields of
experience, locate their experiences relevant to what we’re teaching and then
make the necessary connections through our teaching. From a strictly verbal
perspective, there is nothing more important for effective teaching than a good
example or good story that illustrates what it is we are trying to get our
students to understand or serves as a heuristic that furthers their
understanding. A picture is worth a
thousand words and a good story can paint a picture in the minds of your
students. You must be tuned
into the lives of your students in order to know which examples and stories will
be most effective. Some stories are
quite universal and can be understood by students worldwide no matter what
culture they are from, but other stories may need more cultural backgrounding
for them to be effective.
Motivational supports
are also important. We must build
student success and self-esteem into our course structures and classroom
methods. We need to be interesting
and instill excitement about what we’re teaching. We need to be relevant and connect to
the reality of student lives and experiences. We need to demonstrate a purpose to
learn besides just passing the course because it is a requirement. And lastly we need to show students a
little fun and enjoyment.
And then there are
behavioral supports. We must
structure our courses and classroom methods to provide maximum shaping and
patterning of the requisite behaviors such as reading, writing, note-taking,
studying, test-taking, asking questions, discussion and debate, and getting to
class on time or getting to class at all.
With regard to behavior modification, positive reinforcements (rewards)
and negative reinforcements (removal of unpleasant stimuli) work better than
punishments (giving unpleasantness).
In short, we don’t push students to learn but instead try to pull them into and support them within their learning zone of proximal development. Students will rise to our expectations if we provide them with a ladder to climb on. That ladder, or scaffold, consists of all the things we say and do in order to help students learn.
Neural
Networks And External Information Storage
Our knowledge and
skills reside in neural networks in our brains that are both physical and
informational in nature. As we
teach and successfully make connections in our students’ minds we actually
facilitate the growth of axons and dendrites that make connections between
neurons to form neural networks.
These neural networks form the foundation of our memory, our knowledge
and our thinking and motor skills. It’s pretty exciting to think that
as we teach in the classroom and the light bulb of understanding goes on in our
students’ minds that we are actually altering their brains neurologically!
Our knowledge and
skills also reside in external social networks encompassing all humans in our
own society and other societies around the world and throughout human history,
and all forms of external memory devices like books, paintings, sculpture, photographs, films, CD-ROMS, floppy
disks and computer hard-drives.
This is the notion of distributed intelligence.
Reaching
Students
For teachers who are
teaching in a culture other than their own, reaching students can at first be
difficult because they lack an understanding of their student’s culture and
hence a large part of their students’ lives. While most teachers learn quickly about
their students, some others do not and for them this lack of cultural
understanding can lead to frustration, negative stereotyping, anger and
ultimately failure as a teacher.
And this in turn can have psychological effects such as low self-esteem
and motivation for the students being taught by a foreign teacher.
The
Cross-Cultural Approach
The cross-cultural approach to
communicating can work for people on both sides of an international fence. Methods of intercultural
communication and interaction can assist people from individualistic and
nuclear-family oriented Western cultures coming into collectivistic
extended-family oriented cultures, as in the case of Americans, Australians or
Europeans teaching in the Pacific.
These methods can also assist people from collectivist cultures coming
into individualist cultures, as in the case of Pacific Island students going to
Australia, New Zealand or the United States to attend college. They are also of benefit to
Pacific island students who encounter foreigners as instructors in their home
country, as in the case of students at the College of Micronesia-FSM. And, in general, better
cross-cultural understanding and communication skills by everyone involved in
cross-cultural interactions contributes to happier and more productive
people.
The work of the
American anthropologist Edward T. Hall was pivotal in the development of
cross-cultural communication studies in the United States. Hall’s research into cultural
differences in verbal and non-verbal communications and conceptions of time and
space was utilized by the U.S. Department of State through its Foreign Service
Institute to assist in the training of American foreign service diplomats who
would be stationed overseas. Two of
Hall’s books, The Silent Language
(1959) and The Hidden Dimension
(1966) are still widely read and relevant today in the field of cross-cultural
communications. Hall’s work
demonstrated the value of applying anthropological concepts to the practical
task of training people to work in other cultures. As Hall stated in a landmark 1955
article in Scientific American on the
“anthropology of manners”:
“The role of the
anthropologist in preparing people for service overseas is to open their eyes
and sensitize them to subtle qualities of behavior – tone of voice, gestures,
space and time relationships – that so often build up feelings of frustration
and hostility in other people with a different culture. Whether we are going to live in a
particular foreign country or travel in many, we need a frame of reference that
will enable us to observe and learn the significance of differences in
manners.”
The field of
cross-cultural communications is a hybrid offspring of the social and behavioral
sciences, particularly social-psychology, sociology and cultural
anthropology. It shares the
strengths of the scientifically developed concepts, knowledge, analytical
procedures and data that have been well tested. It also shares some of the
weaknesses. The social and
behavioral sciences, while able to explain and predict a lot about humans, are
also sometimes limited and inexact. The inexact nature of the social and
behavioral sciences is due to the complexity of human individual and collective
thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
When discussing and analyzing a culture we out of necessity deal in
generalizations stereotypes. But
they are generalizations and stereotypes that have been proven to be
statistically valid when applied to large populations of people over time, but
to which nonetheless there are always exceptions and variations in individual
and collective behavior.
The same thing
applies to our classes of students.
We can successfully generalize and predict certain student thought,
emotion and behavior patterns but there will always be exceptions to any rules
we might formulate. There are
always a complexity of variables at work such as student and instructor age,
gender, race and ethnic group, culture, first language, second language,
appearance, personality, the semester and time of the year, the subject matter,
the size, lighting and ventilation of the classroom, the time of day, the
weather and many other tangible and intangible factors. What might work for an instructor one
semester with one mix of students may not work as well with the next, hence the
need to remain empirical, experimental, flexible and responsive.
Some people are
skeptical of the value of improved intercultural communications. For example, there was a rather
ethnocentric person who worked in Micronesia for several years as a journalist
and was continually frustrated due to her lack of cross-cultural
understanding. She could never
“figure out the locals” because she never made an effort to understand and
respect their culture. Her cultural
values and ways were right and theirs were wrong. Before finally leaving the region
she suggested that Micronesian cultures should be “codified” and written in a
book so that her and other expatriates could understand the rules of behavior
better. Cultures cannot be
“codified” but they can be explained in both general and specific terms that
apply most of the time to a wide range of the population in question. We don’t usually talk about “our
culture” per se or make reference to it in our everyday lives, except perhaps
when we are making explicit comparisons between our own and another culture
while discussing culture as part of an academic exercise. Our culture goes unspoken of because its
influence on us is largely at the unconscious level. Culture consists of
well-established cognitive networks that frame and guide our thoughts, emotions
and behaviors without us much noticing the process very much. Culture is also dynamic, with some
parts changing and other parts remaining the same depending on a host of
variables. Cultures also have
room for individual variation, with everyone in a culture not necessarily being
the same. Cultures are not
written into codes, but culturally prescribed values and norms are always
embedded in our social institutions and unwritten rules of discourse and
interaction that we learn through the socialization and internalization
processes. Learning another culture
is a fairly straightforward proposition.
The right attitude, a few communication concepts and some time spent as a
participant observer is all it really takes.