Diverse cultural paradigms are crucial to teach ESL students. Teachers need to understand them to help students to learn a new language. In 1997, Dean Simonton a professor at the University of California-Davis decided to dedicate a large portion of his research agenda to discover some of the more salient factors involving and producing a developmental environment (when they are kids) might contribute the likelihood he or she will be a person of high achievement? To answer that question, Simonton analyzed the lives of approximately 5,000 highly creative people from 700 BCE to 1839 ACE and concluded that, although many factors positively influenced achievement, one of the more significant ones was exposure to cultural diversity. Specifically, he found a positive correlation between highly creative individuals and exposure to cultural diversity in their younger, developmental years. Cultural diversity in the classroom is essential to start the learning experience. Cultur
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Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge -Plato According to the National Standards for Foreign Language Education project (1996), students cannot truly master a new language until they have mastered the cultural context in which the new language occurs. This means that understanding a new culture is an important element in achieving success in second language acquisition. Culture has been defined by shared knowledge and meaning that is derived through processes of interaction and communication. Cultural psychology is an interdisciplinary field that unites psychologist, anthropologist, linguists, and philosophers for a common pursuit: the study of how cultural meaning, practices, and institutions influence and reflect individual human psychologies. In the ELs classroom, we can find different cultures and behaviors that we need to understand. Diversity is the only feature of ESL classrooms. According to Douglas (2000
12/15/19 What do you know about manners around the world? Let's see. Answer the next questions: What do you do when you see someone for the first time in an informal situation? a) shake hands, b) kiss them on the cheek or c) you bow. What do you do when you met a friend or a relative? a) shake hands, b) you kiss them on the cheek or c) you hug them. If someone next to you sneezes, what do you do? a) ignore it, b) you say: "bless you" or c) you say: "Cheers." If you arrange to meet someone at a certain time, you find it...a) normal arrive 10 minutes late, b) rude not be on time, c) normal to arrive 30 minutes late. You see an elderly person standing on the bus. There are no seats left. What do you do? a) you pretend you don't see the person and you keep doing what you are doing in your comfortable seat, b) you ask the person next to you to give up her/his seat, c) you immediately stand up and give your seat. Those are some ex
2/12/19 "Everything starts with your attitude" Teachers engagement with students is very important to get an effective learning process. Teachers need to value and motivate their students. They also need to meet their students individually. Students abilities, skills, and capabilities are important to meet rather than set stereotypes that lack them into the learning process. The curriculum is also an important part of the new language learning process. The Culturally Responsive Pedagogy is central to learning. It is a pedagogy that recognizes the importance of including students' cultural references in all aspect of learning. It is an approach that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Landson-Billigs, 1994). Some of the characteristics of culturally responsive pedagogy are: Positive perspectives on students and their families. Communicat
2/14/19 Big love, apparently, is in mutual trust and respect towards each other's personal space -Johnny Deep Professor Ivers talked about Personal space differences. The term generally refers to the physical distance between two people in a social, family, or work environment. In some places, there's hardly any personal space, and in some places, there's a lot of serious implication to not having personal space. According to research conducted by Dr. Holt and her colleague, and reported in the Journal of Neuroscience, part of the neural response to human faces moving towards us -into our personal space - involves the activation of particular neural network - the pariental-frontal network. There is a defined distance in which we are comfortable with the approach of a stranger. when an unfamiliar face passes that comfort zone, the neural signals begin to fire, creating feelings of discomfort, irritability, and anxiety. Debby Mayne gave us 12 general rul
2/9/19 Attributions are inferences that people draw about the cause of events, others' behavior, and their own behavior. Fritz Heider (1958) was the first person to describe how people make attributions. He suggested that we have the tendency to give causal explanations for someone's behavior, often by crediting either the situation (ex. stress or abuse) or the person's disposition (personality). He argued that there are two general types of attributions that people make: Personal attribution or internal attribution. The causes of behavior to personal dispositions, traits, abilities, and feelings. Situational attribution or external attribution. The causes of behavior to situational demands, and environmental constraints. Teachers can notice when some of their students are hostile, optimistic or pessimistic. Like we see in the next chart: As we can see attributions might impact students' and teacher's beliefs about education and learni
2/12/19 Individualist societies ties are loose and everyone looks out for himself or herself. on the other hand, in collectivist societies, people integrate into strong, cohesive groups; protects each other and exchanged for loyalty. Individualist students are independent, set goals for oneself, compete with others, use direct communication, and prefers to work alone. Collectivist individuals are good in establish interpersonal relationships, have a sense of belonging, develop harmony with others, self alters according to context, a hierarchy is important, and prefers working in groups. As ELs teachers, we need to bridging cultures and understand that the individualism prevailing in the U.S culture. Independence and individual achievement. Promoting self-expression, individual thinking, and personal choice. Egalitarian relationships & flexibility in roles are present. Physical world as knowable apart from its meaning for human life. Furthermore, individualism is as
2/11/19 http://tinyurl.com/yc4e2ro8 Emotional expressivity is one of the things that can be an easy misunderstanding and can cause conflict between people. For example, Hispanic culture is more tolerant to show affection in Public than the Middle East cultures. As an ESL or ELL teachers, we need to consider the different cultural emotions expressivity of our students to create an appropriate environment. Professor Ivers said: Emotional expressivity is one of the things that are more easily misunderstood than many other things in cross-cultural differences. It's very, very easy to interpret different ranges—to misinterpret different ranges of emotional expressivity. In some cultures shake a hand is important when we said hi to someone. For example: In Spain, people kiss in both cheeks someone to say hi or you meet it for the first time but maybe in other cultures could consider this offensive. As teachers, we need to consider that what you may consider funny oth
2/6/19 No everyone follow the cultural rules. Miscommunication can bring tragedy. In each culture people communicate in different form. Professor Ivers talked about miscommunication as a rampant between cultures. And it causes a lot of difficulties; it may even causes wars. Some times miscommunication in marriage can cause divorce. For this reason it is important to communicate effectively. In Mosiah 4:30 King Benjamin said; "Watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds." Improving communication involves watching our actions and or words. As English teachers sometimes we can speak a different language than our students. I not talking about the language, but the form that we send our messages. We need to be sure that students understand our expectations, instructions and we also need to take time to verify if our message it is good received. Communicate effectively implies to be a good listener, body language and clarifying when it is n
2/5/19 Professor Ivers talked about time and cultural paradigms. He mentioned that some cultures are monochronic, but the majority of the world probably are polychronic. We need to consider that monochronic cultures like to do just one thing at a time and polychronic cultures like to do multiple things at the same time. The United States is monochronic. E. T. Hall (1959) called M-time. He believes that people doing one thing at assumes careful planning and scheduling and is a familiar Western approach that appears in disciplines such as "time management". On the other hand, Polychronic cultures value human interactions over the material things. In the United States, human interactions are important but no as in the polychronic cultures. For polychronic people, time is seldom experienced as "wasted" and is apt to be considered a point rather than ribbed or road, but that point is often sacred. We can see the differences between relationships and the time i