Negotiating meaning through intercultural exchange

I presented this topic, “Negotiating meaning through intercultural exchange”, in the IB regional conference held in Kuala Lumpur in 2013. The inspiration of this topic arose from the new requirement, written assignment, by Group 2 language B courses. Just like every Ab Initio teacher felt, I first perceived this assignment was challenging and daunting to my Mandarin beginner students. In order to support my students to be successful in this task, I began to research and try to understand the underlying purpose of the written assignment, and brainstorm possible scaffolding strategies. Through my research and reading, I came to understand the nature embedded in the assignment and begin to appreciate the design of this assessment. 

Globalization has brought the distance between people with diverse cultural backgrounds ever closer. Colin Bakers states that the ownership of two languages has increasingly become seen as an asset as the ‘communication world’ gets smaller. However, being able to use appropriate language to communicate with native speakers does not mean that we have the capacity to interact with others appropriately in a variety of cultural contexts. Students’ intercultural competence skills have to be expanded in our shrinking world. Developing intercultural awareness is a core element to all IB programmes, clearly reflected in the IB mission statement. Students should not merely acquire cultural knowledge as a series of trivia facts.  Instead, educators ought to challenge students to think at a higher level and negotiate meaning to generate culturally appropriate behavior. 

When planning language acquisition lessons, teachers should: 
Discuss with students what culture is. 
In my opinion, discussing with students about what “culture” is in the language acquisition course is essential. One strategy I use is the iceberg approach. Students are shown a model of cultural iceberg and they brainstorm cultural aspects above and below the sea level. Culture encompasses both visible and hidden aspects as shown in the model below.  Students need to understand that a lot more “hidden” cultural aspects require us to pay attention to, reflect on, and react to.

Explore ways for students experience different ways of doing, seeing, classifying, being and acting through second language acquisition process.     
Strategies including, but not limited to: 

• Establish a safe environment. 
• Respect students’ identify and hold the judgements. 
• Build on students’ prior knowledge. 
• Use students as resources. 
• Select relevant and appropriate topics. 
• Use authentic materials whenever possible. 
• Allow time for personal reflection with guiding questions.  
• Design tasks that require students to conduct interviews from different point of views. 
• Have students role play cross cultural scenarios. 
• Have students share how they would relate and/or react to a specific situation in their culture.
• Use anticipation guide to help students identify facts or opinions (cultural stereotypes).  
• Analyze advertisements or events that caused misunderstanding. 
• Ask questions to enable students to explain their interpretation and expand their thoughts. 
• Use See-Think-Wonder thinking routine to allow students make careful observations and thoughtful interpretations.    

Foster higher order critical thinking skills to help students interpret, relate, discover and interact. 

• Teach thinking skills explicitly. 
• Ask purposeful questions to solicit responses and interpretations. 
• Help students to make personal connections after viewing, reading or listening. 
• Provide students with sentence starters to engage them in the thinking process. 
• Use Connect-Extend-Challenge thinking routine to help students develop understanding of new ideas based on their prior knowledge and personal experiences. 

Develop students’ awareness of their own culture and guide students to reflect on how their culture is seen by other people from different cultural backgrounds. 

• Engage students to share alternatives and discuss why someone’s ideas differ from their own. 

By understanding the rationale of the written assignment, I am now in a better position to support my students in preparing for this external assessment task. Most importantly, I believe this process not only guides my students to inquire into the target language culture, but also help them to further discover their identify. 

To conclude, I would like to share this great Ted talk video by Derek Sivers that share how things might be perceived differently and we ought to be more open-minded. 

If you are interested in reading more about developing intercultural awareness of students, you can find some useful resources and explanation of the importance of intercultural understanding in this website: http://interculturalism.blogspot.com/2011/03/iceberg-model-of-culture.html.