Intercultural Dialogue in Practice: Managing Value Judgment through Foreign Language Education (Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education) - Softcover

Houghton, Stephanie Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847697240 ISBN 13: 9781847697240

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

The term intercultural dialogue has become a buzzword at policy level, but there is a pressing need to synchronise the terminology of policymakers with that of academics. An overarching aim of this book is to explore the wide-ranging terminology relevant to intercultural dialogue in order to promote clearer consideration of the underlying issues. More specifically, this book reports the findings of a research project conducted in Japan that brought teaching practice to bear upon some of the main conflicting theoretical perspectives on how value judgment should be managed in foreign language education. At the heart of this issue lies the management of prejudice, which is a key dynamic in intercultural dialogue that brings many other factors into play.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephanie Houghton is an Associate Professor in Intercultural Communication in the Faculty of Culture and Education at Saga University in Japan. Her research activities focus on intergroup relations, self and identity in foreign language education and the development of intercultural communicative competence.

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Intercultural Dialogue in Practice

Managing Value Judgment through Foreign Language Education

By Stephanie Ann Houghton

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Stephanie Ann Houghton
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-724-0

Contents

Figures and Tables, 
Series Editors' Preface, 
Preface, 
Introduction, 
Part 1: Exploring the Roots of Value Judgment, 
1 Information Processing, Socialisation and the Self, 
2 Ethnocentrism and Ethnorelativism, 
3 Theoretical and Political Perspectives upon Value Judgment, 
Part 2: Managing Value Judgment in Foreign Language Education, 
4 Overview of the Study, 
5 The Intercultural Dialogue Model, 
6 Critically Analysing Self and Other, 
7 Critically Evaluating Self and Other, 
8 Shifting the Interface: From Self and Other to Self and Society, 
Conclusion, 
Epilogue, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Information Processing, Socialisation and the Self

The Mind as an Information Handling System

The mind can be seen as an information handling system (de Bono, 1969, 1990, 1991) whose effectiveness derives from its ability to create, store, recognise and retrieve patterns of information. The memory surface of the nerve cells of the brain provides a special, yet essentially passive, environment in which information self-organises as it impacts upon the memory surface, forming channels that guide incoming information into deepening patterns that are influenced by the sequence of arrival and the nature of the surface. Parts of the environment can be attended to selectively, but since attention span is limited, only part of the memory surface can be activated at any one time, which is affected by what is being presented to the surface at the moment and what has happened to the surface in the past.

The most easily activated areas or patterns on the memory surface are the ones that have been encountered most often because they have left the strongest trace on the memory surface, giving rise to pattern repetition or reconstruction because such patterns are recalled more readily than others. Patterns engrained in memory tend to become increasingly rigid and can be difficult to change. Since the sequence of arrival of information determines its arrangement, the information could always be arranged better. Bias is built into the mind as anything resembling a standard pattern tends to be perceived as the standard pattern as information is processed, which centres the information enabling established patterns to string together into longer sequences that may become so dominant that they start to constitute their own patterns.

As information continues to impact upon the brain, the mind builds up a stock of pre-set patterns of information held in memory that facilitate communication through which information is transmitted through codes that refer people back to these pre-set patterns. Words or partial information can be communicated to trigger the retrieval of interlinked information patterns, which means that not all the information needs to be communicated to retrieve the pattern. Word triggers facilitate the transfer of information, rendering appropriate reaction to situations possible as situations are identified from initial aspects of them. Communication through language code thus depends upon the building up of a catalogue of retrievable patterns in memory.

Words can be loaded insofar as the value of the word is not expressed through a separate adjective, but contained within the word itself, and people may use adjectives freely to pass judgment without justification. Words can trigger emotional backgrounds that are unjustified and tend to reflect crude either/or dichotomies imbued with the sense of good and bad, or right and wrong. Such dichotomies, set up through the use of the word not, are based upon mutually exclusive categories that can easily contradict each other facilitating the sorting of information into one category or the other, imposing a false rigidity upon perception in the process.

This description of the mind as an information handling system summarised from the work of de Bono (1969, 1990, 1991) helps us to imagine information about the world being stored in data structures that store concepts in memory in multiple locations throughout the brain in schematic networks (Rumelhart, 1980; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986). In intercultural interaction, schemata provide a repertoire of frameworks regarding social beliefs, cultural values, expectations and assumptions that the person can use to make sense of the intercultural events and relationships (Endicott et al., 2003). Culture learning itself can be conceptualised as the internalisation of information held in schemata that store concepts through which individuals classify and interpret their experience of the world, and culture learning is influenced by language since it involves concept acquisition (Byram, 1989a).

Within interlinked schematic networks of information, words cohere in layered hierarchies with other words sharing many of the same semantic features. Super-ordinate concepts, such as living things, may come at the top of a hierarchy above multiple layers of subordinate concepts that may each contain separate, but hierarchically linked, categories with hierarchies meshing into hetararchies, and each language–culture establishing its own hetararchy (Fantini, 1995). Much human thought involves the categorisation of new objects and events, but while categorisation processes themselves are universal, the way hierarchies and categories are set up is not. This depends upon the amount and type of information people have at their disposal and considerable variation in conceptual thought exists (Rosch, 1978).

Network and hierarchy are two of the dominant images often used to conceptualise the structures in which information is contained in the mind. While the two images are not incompatible, and are often used interchangeably, the most useful image for the purpose of this book is that of concepts being contained in hierarchies rather than networks, not only because it accords with Rokeach's description of the structure of value systems presented below, but also because the concept of hierarchy with discrete and separate elements that are evaluated and ranked relative to each other lends itself well to the structuring of teaching activities that require critical analysis and evaluation, as we shall see.

According to Rokeach (1973), values manifest themselves in everyday life as enduring beliefs that specific modes of behaviour or end-states of existence are preferable to others, that act as guiding standards for action, attitudes, ideology, self-presentation, evaluations, judgments, justifications and comparison between self and others. Highlighting the hierarchical structure of value systems, Rokeach notes that since any given situation will typically activate several values within that system rather than just a single one, and different subsets of the value system will be activated in different situations, a relative dimension comes into play when values come into competition, are prioritised and integrated into relatively stable hierarchically organised systems, wherein each value is ordered in priority or importance relative to other values.

The underlying structural similarities between the descriptions of value systems and conceptual hetararchies presented above are obvious. Further, while concept and value systems have a measure of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847697240
• ISBN 13: 9781847697240
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 214
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland