week 7

The video that we watched in class was really helpful to me as a future educator.  There are a lot of things that we read and learn, but I found it very helpful and refreshing to watch a video and see how real ESL students feel about their writing styles and the way that teachers view them.  One of the most important things, in my opinion, that I took out of this video, was the idea to not lower your expectations of their writing, but instead have empathy and think from their perspective.  It was helpful to relate last week's readings to the video, and realize that every culture has their own writing styles, so sometimes the process of their writing may have nothing to do with the fact that they are NNS, but instead that it is just different in their culture.  This reminded me of when I was abroad, and even though I was in an English speaking country, there were many differences in their writing that I had to become accustomed to.  Not only this, but certain words are spelled differently, such as 'realize/realise', 'traveled/travelled', or 'neighbor/neighbour'.  When I was typing essays on my own computer, it was very difficult to catch these spelling errors, so it was probably very obvious to my professors that I was an American.  I noticed that they never marked off for these mistakes, which I took for granted at the time, but I now realize that they easily could have done so.  The video also mentioned that you can ask a NNS how they want to be graded or what helps them learn.  I also found this very important because it is necessary to take the students thoughts into mind.

Through reading the article by Baker, The Cultures of English as a Lingua Franca, it is important to remember that everyone brings their own culture into a language, and things such as attitude, body language, tone of voice, and the manner that the speaker delivers the message will never be culturally mutual.  However, as I have learned in my ENG 344 class, it is important for NNS to understand certain ideas of interactional competence in order to fully understand the meaning behind some of the things that native speakers do or say.  This could include, as shown in the movie last week, when a person says "What's up?", but doesn't actually want to hear "what is up" with the person they are conversing with, a NNS could find this very offensive.  Another example is if a Navajo man is greeted by an American teacher, she may ask him questions such as "Is Johnny your son? What is your name?".  He may not answer her in this scenario because it is considered rude in his culture to respond.  However, the teacher may think that he is being rude by not responding.

My questions is then, how are cultural differences like this taught to a person?  Is it all dependent on the NNS becoming immersed in the culture in order to fully understand these differences, or can they be simply taught?

Week 6

In the article Differences in ESL and Native English Speaker Writing by T. Silvia, there was a study which had two groups- native English speakers and English as a second language subjects write expository or argumentative essays in 30-60 minute sessions as a placement exam.  Overall, the study showed that the ESL writer’s texts were shorter in word count than NES, and they made more errors overall (including morphosyntactic errors, lexicosemantic errors, spelling and punctuation errors, more errors in cohesive device use, and more verb, noun-pronoun, article, and preposition errors).               

I thought it was interesting that the NES subjects preferred writing how something happened, using detail and organizing information in a text to form a theme-rheme pattern and that they strongly preferred to reintroduce information from earlier in the text to develop another aspect of it.  This is compared to the Japanese students, who preferred to explain why something happened, immediately repeating facts or ideas for emphasis, and to include only logically related information.  These are examples of how there is a culture difference in the way that people learn to write.  In my opinion, this has nothing to do with the fact that the Japanese students are not native speakers, but rather that they were brought up learning a different way to get the point across in writing essays.

What my questions is on this, is how much of the writing style is influenced on culture, and how much of it is influenced by school?  For example, I have never really taken any classes on “how to write an exository or argumentative paper” since I was probably in middle school.  Therefore, I have a very different writing style than another NES who is for an example a psychology major.  In the current psych class that I’m in right now, we are taught to write papers a very specific way, which is not something that I am used to.  Therefore, I think that we can say that where a person got their schooling has a large imapact on the way they learn to write, as well as how much of a concentration that that person had on writing essays growing up.

Cultural Assimilation and its Delusions (#4)

The article by Kumar focuses on the idea of a melting pot in our society today.  This means that the culture we live in is becoming more and more homogeneous.  I think that this is because as more people immigrate into the country, they find the need to become what could be described as Americanized.  It can be looked at as a high school.  As much as everyone wants to stand out and be unique and different, they actually just form into one another and all become the same.  However, even though everyone basically is the same, we all find the need to point out one another's differences.  

To look at the nativist's point of view on cultural assimilation, they included linguistic assimilation.  They stated that new European immigrants were expected to discard their home language and start learning and using English.  Although this is true, i don't not necessarily believe that this is a terrible thing to happen.  Realistically, there is no way that families can completely keep their language alive and not assimilate to the  language of the country that they are in (even if the United States doesn't have an official language).  This is the same with any country, for if I moved to France, I would probably lose a lot of my English, and that isn't necessary a terrible thing, it just means that I am trying to survive in that location.  If there were no linguistic assimilation, there would be no language loss, and no new languages would be created.

#3: Language and Identity

In the article by Hall, the concept of language and identity is discussed. I thought that one of the most interesting things stated was “cultural identities are like cloaks that individuals can put on or take off” (Hall 32).  There are many different ways that one can express their cultural identity.  For example, I don’t not speak the same when I am talking to, say, my parents, teachers, sisters or friends. 

I am usually very formal when talking to a teacher or boss.  When talking to my parents, I am not formal, but I try to be polite, and I never use offensive language. 

I may say a lot of things to my friends that I may not feel comfortable saying to my sisters, but at the same time, I may get angry at my sisters some times and say rude things to them that I would never say to my friends. 

Within my group of friends, I will use different language to the ones who I am close with, to the ones that I am not so close with. 

Even more different than this, when talking to my ex boyfriend who is Scottish, I typically try to refrain from using a lot of “Americanized” words or sayings, and I have even taken a lot of Scottish words out of his vocabulary that I used when talking to him or my other friends from abroad.  However, I would not use this same language while talking to my American friends because they would just have no idea what I was saying.

To go along with all of this, I liked when Hall stated that while being abroad, “national identity is more relevant than gender or social class.  While being in Scotland, I was definitely identified as an American more than anything.  In the workplace, people can often be identified by their social class or who is getting paid the most.  Within a classroom, where no one knows me personally, I would be identified by my gender, as a girl.

All in all, the article summed up that social identities influence our linguistic actions, they do not determine them.  I do not think that each person has “one identity”, and it doesn’t make us fake that we change our linguistic actions from place to place.  It would be extremely rude if I talked to my grandma the way that I talk to my friends.  If I did this, she would probably not talk to me anymore.  It is natural for our social identities to influence out linguistic actions, but at the same time, it’s something that will change throughout our lifetime.