LANGUAGE TEACHING IN A MULTICULTURAL SETTING

Abstract

1

The first aim of this contribution is to underline the

psychological factors that might hinder learners of a

foreign language thus awaking teachers to the necessity

of flexible teaching methods. I will start from the

mention of the main learning strategies used by students,

which teachers should take into consideration in their

lessons. Briefly, teachers should strive to be as

democratic as possible, i.e. to tailor their lessons

according to the learning styles of the pupils. I do not

intend that a teacher will have to adopt as many methods

as the number of students – it would be impossible to

adopt different methods at the same time – but that

he/she should be conversant with the two main learning

styles, which are the analytic and the holistic one.

Afterwards, the scope of the analysis will broaden from

the individual to the social sphere, in order to bring to

light the problems of teaching language in a

multicultural setting, which might also be regarded as

the latest challenge of language teaching. Therefore, a

first possible challenge for language teaching would be

to achieve the ability to balance the lesson and to use a

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method suitable for both analytic and holistic students.

In addition, there are other students’ psychological

traits that a teacher should be aware of, such as

motivation, anxiety and attitudes. The second challenge

involves the teacher’s ability to deal with different

cultures, thus underscoring cultural differences in order

not to banish them but to promote them. In my opinion,

this is the principal challenge of language teaching in

the 21st century.

Keywords

Language teaching, Multicultural, Learning style,

Teaching method.

1. The relationship between learning strategies and

teaching methods

3

Cerebral dominance is one of the main sources of our

personality and behaviour. Most importantly, cerebral

dominance reflects our viewpoint on the world. It has

been proven that our brain is composed of two

hemispheres, the left and the right one. Basically, the

left hemisphere is involved in the analysis of sounds;

indeed it is analytic, logical and sequential. All

acoustic inputs are sequentially processed in this half

of the brain. The right hemisphere is instead concerned

with the processing of visual inputs; it is holistic and

non-sequential. In this half dwell instincts, artistic

skills, musical abilities, imagination, fantasy and

emotions. In order to assess their cerebral dominance,

learners may refer, inter alios, to Oxford’s Style Analysis

Survey (SAS) and Strategy Inventory for Language Learning

(SILL), as well as Riding’s Cognitive Style Analysis

(CSA). Through these devices everyone could discover

whether their brain is auditory or visual thus having the

possibility to choose the most suitable learning

strategy.

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As a matter of fact, analytic students are more

prone to learn through acoustic inputs, such as

conversations, dictations and audio tapes. In fact, they

largely focus on the teacher’s intonation. In case of

visual inputs e.g. texts, their general learning strategy

to memorize is to read them aloud. On the contrary,

holistic students learn more effortlessly through visual

inputs, e.g. images, videos and pictures. Their learning

strategy pivots on photographic memory; for that reason,

most of them need to encircle keywords, to underline

passages, to write notes and to mark the text with

different colours. For a better memorization of acoustic

inputs they jot down keywords and difficult concepts. The

table below mirrors the principal traits of holistic and

analytic persons:

ANALYTIC HOLISTIC

Sequential and linear data

processing

Non-sequential, random data

processing

Focusing on details Focusing on context

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Preference for logic Preference for instinct and

imagination

Objective Subjective

Planning and foreshadowing

problems

Reacting to problems as they

generate

Trouble-shooting by available means Trouble-shooting by imagination and

creativity

Unable to cope with complex inputs Able to cope with complex inputs

Carrying out tasks one by one Carrying out different tasks at the

same time

Perfectionist Risk-taker

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Given this, teachers should strive to enhance the

lesson with both visual and acoustic inputs. Therefore,

they could exploit a large array of new technologies such

as DVD readers, highlight projectors, programs like power

point and producer. Moreover, teachers could upgrade

their lessons with blogs, chat rooms, online language

forums, e-learning platforms and social networks.

Combining visual and acoustic inputs will benefit both

analytic and holistic students; as a result, the lesson

will be more comprehensive and democratic. Also consider

that the 80% of data we take in comes from the sight and

about the 10% from the hearing. For that reason, the

combination of image and sound is likely to produce a

very effective outcome.

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If the teaching method is based solely upon the

teacher’s speech, those students who need to visualize

unknown words and concepts will have the feeling that

they are not learning. As a result, motivation will drop

and their proficiency will consequently decrease. By the

same token, a teaching method based on the translation of

texts will hamper analytic students, whose learning is

facilitated by acoustic inputs.

2. The influence of culture in the teaching process

Due to globalization and the foundation of the European

Union the need of communication between States has become

significantly important. People have the possibility and

sometimes the necessity to change their life by moving

into another country in the perspective of a better

accommodation. As soon as immigrants arrive in a new

country, they may find themselves plunged into a totally

different culture and civilization.

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The terms “culture” and “civilization” should be

clarified at once. According to the anthropologist Lévi-

Strauss (1967) the term “culture” is concerned with the

human reaction to the natural needs. Hence, there are

different ways of providing nourishment, dressing,

housing and procreation; therefore, each culture should

be regarded as the original response to these overriding

needs. Each folk considers that the soul of their culture

is profoundly rooted in certain habits, beliefs and

values. The term “civilization” embodies these social

habits, which everyone will protect by all means. For

instance, the traits of civilization that mostly clash

from one culture to another are religion, circumcision,

infibulation, death penalty, lapidation, the role of

women in society and so forth. Thus, we should be aware

of the thin line between culture and civilization, and

most of all that cultures have all the same dignity,

although certain habits are not allowed in other

civilizations. Consequently, certain habits could be

shared by the host culture, others could be banished.

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Two convenient examples will highlight how cultural

diversities could improve our beliefs. First, Russian

students are acquainted with the abacus since the first

year of primary school. Hence, their presence in European

schools makes the syllabus of mathematics appear unsteady

because even six-year old children are able to understand

logarithms, which in European schools are the target

point. The second example is about physical training at

school. Western countries could learn from oriental

students that the goal of PT lessons is to reach internal

harmony with the body, rather than being hostile

competitions for new records.

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Culture plays a very important role in the process of

learning a foreign language. It is indeed the first

variable in the acronym S.P.E.A.K.I.N.G. set forth by

Hymes (1971). His acronym summarizes the communicative

event. Extending the acronym “S” stands for cultural

scene or setting, “P” for part-takers, “E” for ends of

the interaction, “A” for speech acts, “K” for keys, in

the sense of psychological attitude toward the

interaction, “I” for instruments used in the

communicative event, “N” for norms of social behaviour

and “G” for genre of interaction, e.g. formal speech,

dialogue, monologue, chat and so on.

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How can culture influence one’s cerebral dominance?

According to Piaget (1964) the shape and lateralization

of human brain develop through constant interactions with

the environment. Thus, there might be students coming

from cultures where knowledge is transmitted orally

because their language does not have a written form. This

implies that these students are mostly analytic because

of their exposure to acoustic information. On the

contrary, students from oriental countries may feel at

ease in studying from written texts, although there are

differences concerning the readings from left to right

and from top to bottom. However, the problem is that they

are likely to have difficulties at remembering the

teacher’s speech, because they come from a “visual

culture”. Indeed, there are many alphabets based on

images that influence the cerebral dominance of users.

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Turning now to the relationship between language and

culture, we could notice that one of the main sources of

misunderstanding in a multicultural classroom is the

concept of time. In fact, most of the Western countries

schedule time according to solar cycles but there are

also folks that employ the lunar calendar, e.g. Chinese

people, others who regard time as cyclical and thus

consisting of repeating ages, like Buddhists (cf. Harvey,

1990), and those who do not live by the clock at all. We

could also realize how time deictics diverge from culture

to culture. For instance, the adverb “soon” is liable to

many interpretations, which range from about one hour if

the speaker comes from South Italy or Spain to about ten

minutes if he/she comes from Scandinavian countries. This

difference is undoubtedly to be related to

industrialization, which proliferated more in the

Northern countries than in the Southern ones.

Consequently, the concept of time has been catalogued

according to criteria imposed by machineries, factories

and by technology in general terms. It is not a case that

in such a high-industrialized area as the United Kingdom,

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one of the most common aphorisms is that time is money.

Phone calls and speeches go indeed straight to the point,

whilst in Italy as well as in other countries the

interlocutors exchange many pleasantries before coming to

the point and interrupting them would be very unbecoming.

Quite the opposite, all these courtesies in England would

arouse the feeling of wasting time.

Apparently sloppy details about time and space could

turn into significantly critical points. For instance, we

may wonder why Muslims seem irritated at hearing language

lessons about future tense. One possible answer is that

in their culture the future tense is a particularly

delicate issue, because it is in God’s will, more exactly

inshallah. Therefore, the employment of the future tense in

a dialogue with Muslims will be considered a mark of

arrogance and superiority.

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From a more linguistic point of view, other

attritions may arise in multicultural settings. For

instance, D’Annunzio (2003) has shown that Chinese pupils

have difficulties pertaining to the verb, namely to the

acquisition of tense and aspect. The thing that upsets

Chinese immigrants is changing the morphology of the

verb. After accepting the fact that verbs can vary

abnormally, Chinese students usually concentrate all

their efforts in the mnemonic storage of different forms

of the verb, rather than searching for the general rule.

The reason for such a detrimental attitude is that they

are used to learn texts by heart. The reason for the

problems in understanding verb inflections is that verbs

in Chinese appear only in the infinitive form. As a

result, in this language information about tense and

aspect is to be inferred from the context by means of

temporal expressions, adverbs and particles that are

placed by default at the beginning of sentences.

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Verb inflection for aspect is one more difficulty

concerning Chinese learners. Aspect is the category of

verb that mirrors the point of view on a given situation.

Broadly speaking, you may either describe situations from

the outside, thus not caring of the internal structure of

it, or you may describe them from the inside, taking into

consideration their internal structure and the way they

develop in time. The former view applies to the

perfective, the latter to the imperfective aspect. We

know that English employs the –ing inflection for

imperfective aspect, although it does not always apply.

The point is that not all languages have such a

morphological device; coincidentally, Estonian is among

them (Moseley 1994). We can already picture how aspect

must be difficult for Chinese, who have never seen verb

inflections, and have to learn that verbs can change

their ending not only for tense, but also for aspect,

person and gender (e.g. in the agreement between past

participle and subject in Italian).

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Space is another variable to consider in

intercultural communication. It mostly concerns the

social sphere of the interaction, i.e. sociolinguistics.

Space − in the broader sense of place or situation −

affects the interlocutor’s choice of words, more

technically the paradigmatic axis of language. On the one

hand formal places require formal language, which is

polite, precise, syntactically and morphologically well

organized, without gaps, deletions, contractions,

abbreviations, and the like. On the other hand, we use

informal language in informal situations, i.e. with

interlocutors belonging to the same social level, hence

occupying the same space in the social hierarchy. If the

interlocutor is socially higher, we switch to formal

language and keep a physical distance, which commonly

corresponds to the length of one arm in Western countries

and of two arms in Eastern ones. The physical distance

between teacher and students also changes across

cultures. For instance, authoritarian teachers stand on a

dais that does literally emphasize their higher status.

Additionally, they neither walk around the classroom nor

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have they physical closeness or contact with students.

Given this, we can comprehend that students coming from

such an educational background may undergo a cultural

shock. There may be students who are not used to the

horse-shoe arrangement of the classroom, and others who

have never been requested to present a topic in front of

the teacher and of his/her classmates. Situations like

these can hinder the learning process because those

students who take over the teacher’s space during a

presentation might feel under pressure and anxious, thus

failing to carry out their assignment. It has been

demonstrated by Krashen (1981) that anxiety does indeed

hamper learning and memorization. According to his

theory, in state of anxiety the brain raises an affective

filter that spoils the connections between amygdala and

hippocampus.

Evidence of cultural shock is provided by Ohata

(2005: 11) who conducted a survey related to the

students’ behaviour in new cultural settings, namely on

the attitudes of Japanese learners in America and noted

that:

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All the participants expressed the feelings of difficulty when

they were pressed to change or adapt themselves to be fit into

the American cultural standards. Because their behavioral

patterns or belief systems shaped by their own social/cultural

norms or expectations are so ingrained, they may have felt an

acute frustration as to their inability to change their own

behaviors, despite the immediate needs to acculturate into a

new environment. For example, some of them said that they felt

concerned about the role of students in class, "Should I

volunteer to ask a question to the teacher in class? Should I

reserve myself when I am not sure about what's going on in

class? When should I interrupt into others talking?"

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The more hierarchical is a society, the more

honorific terms are present in language. In fact, the

Chinese language shows a large amount of allocution

forms. Even within the family, Chinese never use the

first name, but they use denotative kinship terms since

first names are sacred. Accordingly, they keep physical

distance among them. Chinese show this attitude in the

classroom too, as they consider the teacher

hierarchically higher. Therefore, being on first-name

terms with the teacher as well as presenting a topic can

be blasphemous to them because they feel they invade the

teacher’s physical and social space.

3. Conclusion

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For reasons of space I have only sketched the main

problems concerning a multicultural classroom. Before

stepping into my argument I have described the two main

learning styles, i.e. analytic and holistic. Afterwards,

I have shown the link between these learning styles and

culture, as well as between culture and civilization.

Then, I have mentioned the influence of culture in

language, namely the different notions of time and space.

I plead guilty for overlooking the plethora of problems

concerning non-verbal communication, such as the role of

kinesthesia and clothing.

Teachers should be aware of students’ cultural

background in order to avoid communication breakdown and

misinterpretations of certain words or habits. Teachers

should also balance their lessons with visual and

acoustic inputs in order to benefit both analytic and

holistic students. Moreover, they should also avoid any

kind of negative reference to cultures, introduce to

cultural diversity and explain that every culture

deserves respect.

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