Some Fundamental Assumptions of a Pedagogy of Performed Culture

1. 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

2. Working assumptions about learning and teaching foreign languages • Learning a foreign language has value. • Humans have a genius for joining groups. • Culture allows us to establish individual identities. • Performance in C2 and L2 is based on situated knowledge. • We don’t learn foreign languages: we learn to do things in foreign languages • The C-L2 learner wants to appear to be an intelligent person. • The goal of C-L2 pedagogy is to help the learner in compile a C-L2 memory. • C-L2 pedagogy has to be more efficient than C-L1 acquisition. • In an efficient C-L2 pedagogy, the teacher disappears.

3. 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

4. Learning a foreign language has value.

5. 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)

6. 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

7. 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)

8. Humans have a genius for joining groups. • 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

9. Culture allows us to establish individual identities.From your culture to you • Culture provides contexts. • Contexts provide meaning. • Meaning establishes intentions. • Intentions identify the individual (i.e., how others interpret you).

10. When communicating in C2, we can only be what C2 allows.

11. 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

12. Performance in C2 and L2 is based on situated knowledge.Performance Knowledge • Specified time • Specified place • Specified roles • Appropriate script/program • An accepting or acceptable audience

13. Performance in C2 and L2 is based on situated knowledge.

14. 主人：你大概还要呆多久，有没有数啊？就想问一下。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. Chinese and American scripts to the same “performance.”

15. 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。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 Two Conversations: negotiating an awkward message

16. Howard Gardner Linguistic Musical Logical-mathematical Spatial Bodily-kinesthetic Personal Naturalistic Robert Sternberg Contextualized adapt-change-move Experiential recognize novel situations- find solutions-internalize-apply Internal premeditate-monitor-evaluate The C-L2 learner wants to appear to be an intelligent person.Kinds of Intelligence

17. 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. The C-L2 learner wants to appear to be an intelligent person.Stanley Coren’s dogs and Galal Walker’s bitter truth

18. 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)

19. 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)

20. 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 all-governing, 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.)

21. 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)

22. Hammerly: language in culture

23. Culture and Participants • Culture Discourses • Achievement culture • Informational culture • Behavioral culture Culture Participants Observer Spectator Collector Critic Player Shareholder • Culture Presentations • Performances • Games • Sports

24. 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.

25. Creating Memory Agent Activity Memory Second-culture Worldview Construction Persona Culture Knowledge And Language Knowledge Cases Sagas Themes Performance/Game Story Compilation

26. Know you know Know you don’t know Don’t know you know Don’t know you don’t know

27. ...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.Language Acquisition

28. 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)

29. 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)

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. C-L2 pedagogy has to be more efficient than C-L1 acquisitionHector Hammerly and Juju • 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) • 12 hours of contextualized language exposure and instruction, with intense personal attention and ridiculously positive feedback. (Juju’s dad)

33. The sage… way off the stage! 功成事遂 百姓皆谓 我自然 Walker.17@osu.edu