Intercultural Communication in the English as a Second Language (ESL) Classroom
By Divine Agodzo
Every day, new immigrants across Canada attend English as a Second Language (ESL) classes that not only immerse them in a foreign language but also a foreign culture. Instruction and learning across this cultural divide can pose significant communication challenges for both teachers and students. This paper suggests that ESL instructors can address some of these challenges by incorporating intercultural communication knowledge and practices into the classroom, using Howard Giles’ Communication Accommodation Theory, Stella Ting-Toomey’s Face-Negotiation Theory and Gerry Philipsen’s Speech Codes Theory.
I posit that ESL teachers can bridge intercultural communication and learning gaps by applying convergence, divergence, and discourse management, all concepts drawn from Communication Accommodation Theory. From Face-Negotiation Theory, awareness of facework and the concept of power distance, will help ESL teachers improve classroom interaction. Teaching practice will also be helped by an appreciation of three key propositions of Speech Codes Theory pertaining to the distinctiveness, interpretation, and force of speech codes.
Communication Accommodation Theory
ESL teachers can employ convergence strategies to accommodate the learning needs of their students. Convergence occurs when you “adapt your communication behaviour in such a way as to become more similar to another person” (Griffin, 2012, p. 395). Two key areas in which ESL teachers can practice convergence relate to the rate/speed of their speech and their vocabulary. Most ESL learners speak slowly, allowing them to think before expressing their thoughts. By mimicking this speech pattern, ESL teachers will provide their students with the reflective and analytical space they need to process the teacher’s words and imbibe learning concepts.
Similarly, teachers should adapt their vocabulary to their students’ limited understanding and use of the English language. For example, telling a class of ESL students to “Ensure you have a concrete thesis at the commencement of your composition” would be a failure to apply appropriate lexicographical convergence. Instead, the teacher might say, “Tell me what you will be writing about, in a short sentence, before you begin work.”
ESL teachers will also need to use appropriate divergence in the classroom. Divergence is particularly useful in modeling correct usage and addressing common pronunciation mistakes. For instance, when a student mispronounces a word or uses a wrong grammatical form, the teacher can illustrate the correction through divergence by restating the sentence correctly, instead of pointing out the student’s error. An international student, for example, might say, “I playing soccer with a friends last weekend,” to which the teacher would say, “You played soccer with some friends last weekend?”
ESL teachers can also apply discourse management to foster intercultural engagement with their students. As Shepard, Giles and Le Poire (2001) note, “discourse management strategies focus upon the other person's conversational needs and attune to them" (p. 36). Students could be asked, for example, to select a favourite tourist attraction in their home country and explain why it is a must-see for visitors. Or the teacher might ask students to share aspects of their country’s culture with the class. Discourse management of this kind is likely to elicit greater expressiveness from ESL students and increased opportunities to practice and develop their oral communication skills because the selected topics allow them to discuss subjects in which they have expertise or interest.
Face-Negotiation Theory
The concept of facework (Ting-Toomey, 1999) helps ESL teachers understand how culture might influence students’ attitudes toward individual performance and group work. People from individualistic Caucasian cultures generally have “self-face” concerns to preserve their autonomy whereas people from collectivistic cultures mostly exhibit “other-face” concerns to “defend and support another person’s need for inclusion” (Griffin, 2012, p. 412). As most ESL learners are from collectivistic cultures, the teacher may notice a reluctance by students to stand out academically, because that could be perceived as elevating “self-face” over “other-face.”
The reservations that students from collectivistic cultures may have about standing out academically can manifest in various ways in the classroom. It may inhibit students from answering questions in class, even when they have great ideas, because exhibition of their academic abilities runs counter to other-face concerns for the class. The individualistic expectation in Western cultures that students work independently (for example during exams) may also be disregarded. By sharing answers to test questions with classmates, students from collectivistic countries like China are merely demonstrating other-face concern, not cheating.
A potential solution to the challenges posed by “face-giving” in the ESL classroom is greater reliance on team work and explaining expectations, and “rules” up front. By working as a group and sharing the same marks, the other-face concerns of students from collectivistic cultures are addressed. Multiple small groups could be created in the class, allowing for some measure of inter-group competition. The ESL teacher must however carefully facilitate discussions within the teams to prevent groupthink, a phenomenon that teams in the ESL classroom may be more prone to because challenging the ideas of group members could be perceived as not face-giving.
Another cultural factor likely to influence classroom discourse is the high power distance orientation of students from collectivistic cultures, where “there is great importance placed on status and rank” (Dainton & Zelley, 2011, p. 185). Research has shown that “for large power distance cultures…formal verbal and nonverbal interaction is expected. For small power distance cultures, informal verbal and nonverbal interaction is preferred" (Ting-Toomey, 1999, p. 265). Because teachers occupy a very high place in the social hierarchy of collectivist cultures, they are accorded much reverence and deference. Students hardly speak to the teacher and even refrain from asking questions because this is construed as not maintaining appropriate power distance. Students also treat teachers as unchallengeable bastions of knowledge, hence a “jug and mug” pedagogic model is the norm (that is, the students are just containers that the teacher must fill with knowledge). The ESL teacher will therefore need to work harder to draw these students out and get them to engage in critical thinking, as opposed to viewing themselves as mere passive receivers of knowledge.
Speech Codes Theory
Speech Codes Theory has another important lesson for ESL teachers – avoid putting all your students in one cultural box because "each community has its own cultural values about speaking and these are linked to judgments of situational appropriateness" (Philipsen, 1990, p. 11). While collectivistic cultures have commonalities, individuals from specific speech communities within these cultures have distinct communication practices and rules. Even factors such as the specific region in a country that the foreign student grew up in and the corresponding cultural, social, educational and economic context will have an impact on speech codes. For example, some students who grew up in a collectivistic culture may have been so exposed to Western cultural values that they may have speech codes closer to those of the Nacirema (the theory’s name for the archetypical North American) than other students in the class from the same country.
Philipsen’s proposition on the interpretation of speech codes will help the ESL teacher avoid the mistake of cultural over-generalization. This construct asserts that we must turn to the users of a speech code to help us interpret the code; after all, “it’s their practice; they decide what it means” (Griffin, 2012, p. 425). This demands that the ESL teacher be a pseudo-ethnographer, committed to investigating and understanding the various speech codes of students in his or her class. The teacher can begin this process by asking the students and potentially their parents to fill out a short survey prior to the start of classes. Alternatively, this could be accomplished by interviews. The questionnaire or interview questions should aim at identifying the speech values of the particular student by probing cultural do’s and don’ts and how they might help or hinder classroom communication and learning.
Finally, ESL teachers need to acknowledge the force of speech codes, implying that they have very real and practical implications and may be difficult to dismiss or alter. Cultural speech codes are not easy to break. A student who has learned from childhood that teachers must not be questioned will be under the strong influence of this cultural taboo even after the ESL teacher has explained that this does not apply in Western society. That means ESL teachers will need to be patient and continue to explain the different needs and expectations of the new learning environment to their students. The teacher should aim for slow but steady change in his students’ behaviors, recognizing that it will take some time to unlearn familiar speech codes, and that some will do this faster than others. The teacher must help his or her students along the journey of transformation by also making practical changes to course material and pedagogy that show awareness of the force of culture.
References
Dainton, M., & Zelley, E.D. (2011). Applying communication theory for professional life:
A practical introduction (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Griffin, E. (2012). A first look at communication theory (8th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Philipsen, G. (1990). Speaking “like a man” in Teamsterville: Culture patterns of role enactment
in an urban neighborhood. In D. Carbaugh (Ed.), Cultural communication and intercultural contact (pp. 11-20). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved from http://www.questia.com
Shepard, C. A., Giles, H., & Le Poire, B. A. (2001). Communication Accommodation
Theory. In W. P. Robinson & H. Giles (Eds.), The new handbook of language and social psychology (pp. 33-56). Chichester, England: Wiley. Retrieved from http://www.questia.com
Ting-Toomey, S. (1999). Communicating across cultures. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Retrieved from http://www.questia.com
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