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A Case Study of Asian Students in Language Schools. The need of enhancing cross-cultural awareness between teachers and students
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A Case Study of Asian Students in Language Schools The need of enhancing cross-cultural awareness between teachers and students (quoted from Mingsheng Li, Culture and Classroom Communication: A case study of Asian students in New Zealand Language Schools, The joint NZARE-AARE Conference 2003 at Hyatt Regency Hotel & University of Auckland, New Zealand 29 November-3 December 2003)
A fundamental concept for later discussion Learning styles have been defined as the characteristic cognitive, affective and physiological behaviors that serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with and respond to the learning environment. (Melton, C. (1990) Bridging the cultural gap: a study of Chinese students’ learning style preferences. Regional English Language Centre Journal, 21(1), 29-55, p.30)
The findings indicated that some Asian students held strong negative views about the education quality in the schools, including teachers’ teaching competence, course content, and teaching approaches. Some teaching approaches and methods were considered incompatible with students’ learning concepts, such as classroom involvement, participation, spontaneous and interactive teaching, group work, and meaning-focused classroom activities.
Response to the interactive teaching approach: 1) What is “interactive teaching approach”? Interactive, communicative or task-based teaching approach that emphasizes meaning-based interaction, student participation and involvement, group work, pair work, debates, and discussions and interactive tasks is performed in a “pseudo-laboratory-type setting”.
2. Complaints from students: 1) The teachers spent too much time involving students in group work, discussions, debates, and games, they routinely organized the class to play games and to engage in group activities that had nothing to do with language learning and the IELTS.
2) Group work was time-consuming and very counter-productive and it was organized for very good students only. Students couldn’t improve their English by talking with classmates with the same English level. Especially when all the students are from one country, such as China. There is no learning environment conductive anymore.
3) Some students were humiliated by these teachers who treated them like preschool children by forcing them to play games and to engage into group work and activities that they did not find useful to their language acquisition.
4) Teachers spent too much time on simple grammar practices.
Response to the spontaneous classroom interactions 1) What is the spontaneous classroom interactions? Spontaneous teaching stresses the importance of spontaneous, on-the-spot, un-prepared, instantaneous classroom interaction. Any pre-planned speeches are frown upon. This approach requires teachers to have good teaching competence and classroom management skills as well as the close cooperation of the students to create a rich-learning environment.
2. Complaints from students 1) They considered this approach as disorganized, unplanned, unstructured, incoherent, unsystematic, purposeless, ineffective and irresponsible.
2) The spontaneous discourse gave Asian students an impression that their teacher did not prepare their lessons.
3) The spontaneous teaching approach, which was intended to encourage students to actively interact in class, de-motivated them.
4) Students lost effectiveness without proper textbooks and selected materials with respect to IELTS practice.
Questions: 1. What is the learning style of Asian students from your perspective? • More reflective than impulsive (less thoughtful questions might be laughed at by other students, there is much more interaction outside class with the teacher) • Prefer a slow, accurate, systematic approach • Are less comfortable with guessing or predicting • Feel the need for rapid and constant correction • Have a low level of tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty
2. What are the current problems of intercultural education? 3. How to create learning environments that are inclusive?
Tisdell. Elizabeth, Creating inclusive adult learning environment: insights from multicultural education and feminist pedagogy, XD 293
1. Current problems of intercultural education 1) Most people do it in an indirect way. They didn’t question the epistemological grounding of the curricular structure of higher education system, but tried to deal with some multicultural issues by fitting them into the current system. 2) Educators used subtle methods to raise cultural awareness, i.e. out-of-class reading, discussion stimulated during break times to introduce students to such matters as gender equity, neglected minority figures, and the problem of stereotype.
3) It is difficult to create an environment in which students will honestly discuss the multicultural issues. Students do have the privilege of being white, male, monied or whatever, find it almost traumatizing to have to see the world from an even slightly different perspective. 2. Suggestions: 1) Educators need to consider carefully how they will define “inclusive” relative to a specific learning activity and the levels of contexts to be considered in determining that definition.
2) Educators should draw attention on the curricular materials and teaching strategies, which might appear to address the issues related to those who have been marginalized. 3) Educators should attempt to become conscious of the ways their own unconscious behavior in the learning environment which would contribute to challenging or reproducing society’s unequal power relations. For example, the illustrative stories used.
