Transcript Becoming Somebody in China

Beijing
Foreign Language University
December 19, 2003
Some
Fundamental Assumptions of a
Pedagogy of Performed Culture
Galal Walker
The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio USA
National East Asian Languages Resource Center
United States Department of Education
Working assumptions about learning and
teaching foreign languages
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Learning a foreign language has value.
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Humans have a genius for joining groups.
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Culture allows us to establish individual identities.
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Performance in C2 and L2 is based on situated knowledge.
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We don’t learn foreign languages: we learn to do things in foreign languages
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The C-L2 learner wants to appear to be an intelligent person.
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The goal of C-L2 pedagogy is to help the learner in compile a C-L2 memory.
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C-L2 pedagogy has to be more efficient than C-L1 acquisition.
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In an efficient C-L2 pedagogy, the teacher disappears.
VALUE: Putting price on the knowledge of language and culture.
INTELLIGENCE: Concepts of intelligence in relation to
language learning
CULTURE: Sketch how language works in culture.
MEMORY: Propose some principles for learning language in
culture
Learning a foreign language has value.
Costs of learning and not learning
Chinese language and culture.
1. Defense Language Institute
@$27,000 per year 92 weeks = $47.7K
(GAO January 2002)
2. Average cost of an executive prematurely
returning home from China:
$50,000
3. Trade with China (People’s Daily, January 2002):
exports to China
imports from China
Japan
US$3,266m
US$3,165m
(+101m)
USA
US$1,841m
US$4,424m
(-2,583m)
EU
US$2,743m
US$3,476m
(-733m)
What You Have to Do to Participate
Successfully in the Workplaces of C2
• Become part of a community
• Fit into an organization
• Work toward common goals
• Make yourself into an asset to the group
Language without culture?…
•She sees a female president of Hispanic origin within the next 20
years, and surgical “brain implants” that will make it easy to speak
another language or play golf. “I think they already have the
technology for that,” she says. (Furio p. 14)
•Kurzwell predicts that the technology that led to computers
reading aloud from written texts will soon give birth to the
translating telephone. Imagine chatting to someone who
speaks a different language, yet each hears the conversation
in his or her native tongue. (Thomas 8D)
Humans have a genius for joining groups.
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We create the largest herds on the planet
We identify with groups
We alter our behavior for groups
We can sustain contradictory behaviors
between groups
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From your culture to you
Culture allows us to establish individual identities
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Culture provides contexts.
Contexts provide meaning.
Meaning establishes intentions.
Intentions identify the individual (i.e., how
others interpret you).
When communicating in C2, we can only be
what C2 allows.
Hector Hammerly’s Cones
Cult ural Compehence
Communicat ive
Compet ence
Linguist ic
Compet ence
Context is nearly everything
• Expressions do not mean; they are prompts for us
to construct meanings by working with processes
we already know. In no sense is the meaning of an
utterance “right there in the words.” When we
understand an utterance, we in no sense
understand “just what the words say;” the words
themselves say nothing independently of the richly
detailed knowledge and powerful cognitive
processes we bring to bear.
Mark Turner, Reading Minds
Performance in C2 and L2 is based on situated knowledge.
Performance Knowledge
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Specified time
Specified place
Specified roles
Appropriate script/program
An accepting or acceptable audience
Performance in C2 and L2 is based on situated knowledge.
吃饭了。
吃饭了。
Beginning a meal.
Response to greeting
吃饭了。
吃饭了。
Reached the capacity to
eat
Answer to a question
Chinese and American scripts to the same “performance.”
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主人：你大概还要呆多久，有没有数啊？
就想问一下。
客人: 差不多一个多礼拜，到这个月底，
如果不太麻烦的话，我搞的研究到那时候
基本上就算结束了。
主人：没问题。你来我们都挺高兴。对
了。。。这个。。。不是周末的时候，在
外面时间是不是可以稍微短一点，能不能
早一点回来。。。要不。。。， 反正周末
的时候来晚一点没关系。
客人：我每天都呆在图书馆呆到关门。其
实那儿周末关门倒比平常要早。。。。我
给大家添麻烦了吧，对不起，是不是声音
太大了？我不知道你们每天等着
我。。。。
主人：干脆我给你一把钥匙好了。要不你
也尽量早点儿回来。还有我看。。。那
个。。。冲马桶什么的容易打搅别人的事
情。。。她们不习惯别人在这儿睡得太
晚。
客人：好，好。。。没问题。谢谢。这儿
一般大家都什么时候休息？唉，对不起，
我都没注意到。。。。
主人：这么跟你说，没伤了和气什么的。
现在反正都说妥了。是吧。。。
客人：是，是。。。
主人：多余的话不用说了吧。。。好。那
么，我们洗碗吧。
H: Do you have any idea how long you will be staying?
Just curious.
G: About a week and a half longer. To the end of the
month. If that is OK with everyone. My research here
will pretty much be done by then.
H: Sure we’re glad to have you. During the week
though…any chance of maybe keeping…a little
bit…shorter hours during the week or
something…Maybe just staying out late on
weekends.
G: I’ve been staying at the library until it closes.
Actually…it closes earlier on the weekends than
during the week. I’m sorry if I am bothering anyone.
Am I I making to much noise?
H: Why don’t I give you a key….maybe try to come in a
bit earlier. I guess things like flushing the toilet and
things tend to disturb people. They’re not used to
people keeping late hours.
G: Sure. Thanks. What time to people go to bed.. Sorry, I
didn’t realize….
H: I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings or anything. We got it
all straightened out now, so….
G: Yah, sure…..
H: We don’t have to say any more about it….Good…Let’s
wash the dishes now.
Two Conversations: negotiating an awkward message
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主人：你能不能早一点回来呢。。。
就说。。。啊。。。回来以后在家再
念。这样。。。我怕你。。。回来。。
那么晚回来。每天早上那么早出
去。。。怕你吃不消。
客人：啊。。。我这么晚回来不方便。
主人：不是啦。。。我。。。
客人：每天早点睡觉。
主人：倒不是。。。。
客人：如果不方便，我可以。。。。
主人：你住我们家我们是非常欢迎。
这样太辛苦。。。身体重要。在这边
住习惯不习惯？
客人：习惯了。
H: Could you return a little earlier…that is to say…uh,
study after you return...like that. I’m afraid
you…return…return so late every night and leave so
early in the morning…I’m afraid you can’t take it.
G: Oh, it’s a bother if I come back late.
H: Oh, no. That’s not it…I…
G: Should I go to bed earlier everyday.
H: No, that’s really not it.
G: If it is inconvenient, I could….
H: I am really glad you are staying at out house. (But) You
are over doing it…health’s important. Are you
comfortable staying here?
G: Yes
The C-L2 learner wants to appear to be an intelligent person.
Kinds of Intelligence
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Howard Gardner
Linguistic
Musical
Logical-mathematical
Spatial
Bodily-kinesthetic
Personal
Naturalistic
Robert Sternberg
• Contextualized
adapt-change-move
• Experiential
recognize novel situationsfind solutions-internalize-apply
• Internal
premeditate-monitor-evaluate
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The C-L2 learner wants to appear to be an intelligent person
Stanley Coren’s dogs and Galal Walker’s bitter truth
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Who and what we hope to
be in the other culture
depends on what they
will permit us to be.
Our ability to function
in the culture depends
on our ability to
recognize their
possibilities.
We don’t learn foreign languages:
we learn to do things in foreign languages
• Just do it!
• From classrooms to workplaces
– Cases (Doing things– using large numbers,
shopping, refusing, persuading…)
– Sagas (Doing things with particular people and
at particular places—office, shop, classroom)
– Themes (Conveying culture values– explicit
hierarchy vs. implied equality)
And This is Why Learning a Second Language is so Difficult
• The moment we teach a language as an explicit set of
rules for generating well-formed strings out of context,
the enterprise seems to go badly wrong. The rule in
natural language learning is that language is learned in
order to interact with someone about something the two
of you share. (Bruner 1978 p.49)
Consciousness & the Mind
Consciousness is a wonderful instrument for helping us to
focus, to make certain kinds of decisions and discriminations,
and to create certain kinds of memories, but it is a liar about
mind. It shamelessly represents itself as comprehensive and allgoverning, when in fact the real work is often done elsewhere,
in ways too fast and too smart and too effective for slow, stupid,
unreliable consciousness to do more than glimpse, dream, and
envy.
(Mark Turner, The Literary Mind, p. 6.)
Reasoning
The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the
thinnest veneer of human thought, effective because it is
supported by this much older and much more powerful, though
usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all
prodigious Olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good
that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is
a new trick, perhaps less than 100,000 years old. We have not
yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just
seems so when we do it. (Hans Moravec, 1988)
Hammerly: language in culture
Hammerly’s Cones
Cult ural Compehence
Communicat ive
Compet ence
Linguist ic
Compet ence
Culture and Participants
Culture
Discourses
•Achievement culture
Culture
Participants
• Informational culture
Observer
• Behavioral culture
Spectator
Culture
Presentations
• Performances
• Games
• Sports
Collector
Critic
Player
Shareholder
The goal of C-L2 pedagogy is to help the learner to compile a C-L2
memory
(Story)
• A story consists of the declarative and
procedural knowledge sustaining a
performance in the target culture, plus the
knowledge of having participated in that
performance. As the basic unit of knowledge
in foreign language study, the more
appropriate C2 stories our learners can
participate in, the more intelligent they will
appear to be to members of C2.
Creating Memory
Activity
Memory
Agent
Second-culture
Worldview
Construction
Persona
Culture Knowledge
And Language
Knowledge
Performance/Game
Story
Cases
Sagas
Themes
Compilation
Know
you
know
Know
you
don’t know
Don’t know
you
know
Don’t know
you
don’t know
C-L2 pedagogy has to be more efficient than C-L1 acquisition.
Language Acquisition
...my granddaughters for example .
We ask what special properties
they have that underlie an
obvious but nonetheless
remarkable fact. Exposed to a
world of “buzzing, booming
confusion,” each instantly
identified some intricate subpart
of it as linguistic, and
reflexively without awareness
or instruction (which would be
useless in any event),
performed analytic operations
that led to knowledge of some
specific linguistic system.
(Noam Chomsky 2001, F13)
There is an enormous amount
of teaching involved in
transmitting the language,
though very little of it has
to do with language
lessons proper. It has to do
with making intentions
clear as a speaker and an
actor, and with
overcoming difficulties in
getting done in the real
world what we want done
by the mediation of
communicating. (Bruner
1978, p. 49)
C-L2 pedagogy has to be more efficient than C-L1
acquisition.
Long before children
acquire language, they
know something about
their world. Before they
can make verbal
distinctions in speech,
they have sorted the
conceptual universe into
useful categories and
classes and can make
distinctions about
actions and agents and
objects. Bruner (1978,
p.42)
Imparting Cultural Values
The influence of cultural values is evident in the tendency of
American mothers and Japanese mothers to focus on different
aspects of the social situation. When playing with toys with their
infants, American mothers called attention to object names, while
Japanese mothers used the toys more often to engage the infants in
social routines.
• That’s a car. See the car? You like it? It’s got nice wheels.
• Hai buubuu. (Here! It’s a vroom vroom.) Hai dozoo. (I give it to
you.) Hai kore choodai. (Now give this to me.) Hai arigatoo.
(Yes! Thank you.)
(Fernald and Morikawa p. 653)
Foreign Language in the Brain
• Significant main effects for language area (P<0.000059) and
bilingual type (P<0.000084) with an interaction effect
(P<0.000067) show that activation sites for the two different
languages tend to be spatially distinct in Broca’s area when the
second language was obtained late in life and not when acquired in
early childhood; and that Wernicke’s area showed little or no
separation of activity regardless of age of acquisition.
(pp. 172-73)
• Our findings are summarized by the analysis of variance in which
language area (Broca’s and Wernicke’s) was compared with
bilingual type (early and late) with respect to the centre-to-centre
distance in millimetres between the two language centroids.
Foreign Language in the Brain
• Significant main effects for language area (P<0.000059) and
bilingual type (P<0.000084) with an interaction effect
(P<0.000067) show that activation sites for the two different
languages tend to be spatially distinct in Broca’s area when the
second language was obtained late in life and not when acquired in
early childhood; and that Wernicke’s area showed little or no
separation of activity regardless of age of acquisition.
(pp. 172-73)
• Our findings are summarized by the analysis of variance in which
language area (Broca’s and Wernicke’s) was compared with
bilingual type (early and late) with respect to the centre-to-centre
distance in millimetres between the two language centroids.
C-L2 pedagogy has to be more efficient than C-L1 acquisition
Hector Hammerly and Juju
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A conservative estimate is that a
preschool child has over 18,000
hours (10x365x5) of contact
with his native language
between the ages of one and
six. (Hammerly, p95)
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12 hours of contextualized
language exposure and
instruction, with intense
personal attention and
ridiculously positive feedback.
(Juju’s dad)
The sage… way off the stage!
功成事遂
百姓皆谓
我自然
[email protected]