chinese girl

Chinese Girl | Aaron Dods | June 14th, 2005

Hi everyone,

This is my first e-mail to the group. Here goes nothing;

I'm wondering if anyone has any opinions on the dilemma the Chinese girl faces in the cultural politics section of FND AWD.

I concur with Julian Edge in that learning a language is about "developing internal abilities" not "mastering external models" but I see no reason why a person with the necessary quantity and quality of exposure to two (or more) cultural patterns of text organisation cannot internalise them both (or several of them).

And that the person will be able to select the appropriate pattern of discourse as required, and that this person's "self" can be an amalgamation of their various "selves"; maybe I can even call this "duality or plurality of the self"?

I guess I have come to think like this from living in Japan, where the Japanese display different aspects of their selves depending on the social situation.

Many thanks,

Aaron
Tokyo

Re: Chinese Girl | Joe Alvaro | June 14th, 2005

Hi, Aaron, and welcome to the list.

That little anecdote captured my interest when I was doing the FND and I suspect that the Chinese girl in question was having a problem reconciling her 'real' image of self with an unfamiliar or foreign one. This is probably related to the concept of 'face', which is interpreted by different cultures in different ways. The image of 'self' in our western culture is highly individualistic and is sometimes at odds with cultures that attach differing values to the same factors.

Though there are huge variations within the individuals of any one culture, it is well known that Asians tend to be 'collectivistic' and their concept of self is not always compatible with the 'individualistic' western notion.

The reason I mention this is because these fundamental differences in face strategies lead to the use of varying rhetorical strategies. Scollon & Scollon (1995) imply that poor communication is not necessarily due to inadequate vocabulary, bad grammar or poor pronunciation but rather to culturally situated variables such as misreading contextualisation cues and situated inferences, etc.

All that to say: "no error of grammar can make a speaker (or writer) seem so incompetent, so inappropriate, so foreign, as the kind of trouble a learner gets into when he or she doesn't understand or otherwise disregards a language's rules of use (Rintell-Mitchell 1989).

Basically, cultures have their own way of constructing discourse, and this factor, rather than linguistic ones, is often the cause for misunderstandings.

Don't know if that helps, but it may explain why the girl was having such a hard time adopting a 'foreign' (L2) strategy in her thinking and hence, her writing.

Cheers,

Joe
China

 

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