TESOL Pedagogy II

Personal Experience  I remember one time when I was talking with friends from different cultures, the majority were American, there was one Korean guy and a Mexican girl (me). We were talking about how is the place where we live, when it was my turn I answered: "It's pretty nice if you don't mind listening to shootings in the middle of the night" Now, unless you are from my culture or have a similar one, you are probably shocked, my friends were no different. I left my phone for a minute to attend something and when I returned, I was met with conceded texts, I realized that even though it may be common here to shoot at the sky in the middle of the night to celebrate things like New Year's Eve, the Mexican Revolution, and the victory of your favorite soccer team, it could be considered dangerous and frightening to the rest of the world. I had to explain that everything was fine and be more careful with my comments from thereon....

  Introduction... In a TESOL classroom, you are guaranteed to have cross-cultural students, and as a TESOL teacher, this is something you need to have in. mind all the time. Every student will have paradigms and a specific behavior they were taught or got accustomed to as they were growing up. If we don't take the time to unwrap and discover the differences between our cultures, it could lead to misunderstandings and bad experiences in the classroom. Cross-cultural  collision... Let's imagine a scenario, you are a teacher in a classroom with Asian and Hispanic students, you notice that some students are quiet and barely participate, others are being really loud and it will seem as if they were arguing with you, you will notice that from time to time students are talking among themselves. When they are working in groups and pairs you roam around the room and look at some uncomfortable and confused faces. At the end of the day, everyone seems drained and discouraged....

 Introduction... What do you blame when you succeed or fail in something? Yourself? Your surroundings? Attribution is how we reason why things happened as they did. And there are different classifications of how we attribute things. Internal attribution: When we blame ourselves or our abilities for the outcome. External attribution: When we blame others or the circumstances for the outcome. Stable attribution: When it is something that always happens. Unstable attribution: When is something that happened on that specific occasion.                                          Reflection ... I learned that we can blame things on other people, certain circumstances, or ourselves, but that doesn't mean that our perspective is the truth, we will believe what we want to believe, and certainly our culture has a great imp...

Little introduction... How big is your personal bubble? How far does a person need to be so you don't feel threatened? Our personal space is sacred, how close we let someone get to our personal space can be a giveaway of what that person means to you, but this distance can vary from culture to culture, in places with crowded environments people have smaller personal bubbles because is necessary given the circumstances, whereas rural and less populated areas have more liberty in space, thus a bigger radio of personal space. Wide personal space cultures feel threatened or uncomfortable when we trespass their personal bubble, while small personal space people may feel  rejected or that you are being cold because you are keeping an unnecessary vast distance in their point of view.                         Personal experience... A few years ago, I went to visit my grandma and she took me to the town's fair, while we were there, ...

  Little introduction... And yet another aspect of culture. Do you desire to be part of the group or do you desire to stand out and define your own persona? Collectivism culture takes pride in being part of an organized system and fear being labeled as the black sheep of the crowd, on the other hand, the individualism culture relish being unique and outstanding, while they feel captive if they have to follow the same protocol as everyone else.                                              Involving education...   So how does this affect education? When you work with a collectivist classroom you are working with a group and a group only, everyone will be treated the same, will have the same responsibilities, and the mistake of one will affect all. With an individualist classroom, every student will have a different idea of how things should be, how are they going to...

Context...     It is a beautiful day and you decide to go outside, you are looking around, how are the people around you acting? Are people shouting and making wild gestures, living the moment? Or are they more resaved and collected of how they feel, waiting until they get home to show how they truly feel?     One of the many aspects influenced by culture is emotional expressivity, the tolerance each place has can vary from high to low or any point in the middle. This can create misunderstandings between cultures, passion can be confused as wildness or rudeness, and reservation can be confused as dullness or pride, when is nothing of the sort, just a difference in paradigms.     In what part of the spectrum do you consider yourself in? How can you be more understanding of those who find themselves in another part? Personal experience...     I have a friend with binational culture, his mom is Mexican and...