Multicultural Communications

"Laboratory activities should accurately portray the nature of science (NOS). In well-designed and well-conducted laboratories, students construct new meaningful concepts and generate “if...and...then...therefore” arguments and hypothetico- deductive inferences, managing “ideas that work extremely well at explaining the natural world in naturalistic terms we can understand, making accurate predictions, and guiding further empirical research”, in other words, experiencing the way science comes down to patterns that are naturalistic, testable, and always open to revision.

...we see a teacher investigating even more than teaching in some traditional sense of “transmitting knowledge”; this teacher always tends to be brief: He or she must constantly refrain from giving notions to students (that would often be answers to never-asked questions!); she has the key role to provoke, to challenge students, and to suggest to them activities for finding answers themselves; according with the “degree of openness” of the particular laboratory, he allows real choices; she has a facilitating style: rather than interrupting and correcting students, she helps to spread students’ good ideas and strategies in the classroom and to find new ones. Such a teacher’s work is renewed and enriched year after year by new and unexpected results. Of course, he must find solutions for an authentic and honest assessment, respecting the nature of the laboratory activity.

«Students need to be made aware that the scientific community, not public opinion polls, individual scientists, or small groups of scientists decide what is good science» (Michael P. Clough).

But while it is true that laboratory requires much of the teacher, we ought to say that laboratory can help the teacher to construct his own professional identity. So we advise teachers not to wait to become “highly skilled enough” to start using laboratory activities; on the contrary, they can use laboratory activities to construct their competence."

It is increasingly common for schools to form partnerships with schools in the countries of languages learnt in the classroom. While there has been substantial investigation of language and culture learning in the tertiary study abroad context, there has been limited research attention to pedagogical interventions which may support learning in young exchange travellers. This study applied the principles of intercultural language learning to the exchange context. The article reports the impact of a three-phase intervention which was designed to extend student intercultural learning, before, during, and after, two exchange trips, to China and Europe. Student response to the intervention is assessed through the analysis of student journal and blog data, using criteria developed from a three-tiered model of descriptive, dialogic, and critical writing. The study shows that the intervention facilitated student observation skills in both groups, but had more limited success in the development of self-reflection in relation to the exchange environment. It offers strategies for effective design of such teaching interventions, as an important contribution to current language education.

In the development of intercultural language learning, limited research has been conducted on language learners' negotiation of identity and cultural memberships. There is little research in particular on intercultural identity in young (primary school) language learners. With the global growth of languages in the primary school, it is timely to examine the quality of young learners' experiences and their achievement of intercultural goals in more depth. This paper reports findings from a qualitative case study of intercultural competence in a group of Australian upper primary school language learners. The paper demonstrates that the case‐study students are self‐aware of their sense of change and transformation through language learning, and show sophisticated critical negotiation of their simultaneous memberships of different cultural groups. It highlights for teachers the dynamic personal and complex framework constructed by young learners in their interaction with language study.

Aquesta tesi estudia la construcció de la identitat acadèmica a través de l'aprenentatge de l'escriptura acadèmica en anglès com a llengua estrangera, en base a un marc teòric que recull aportacions del socioconstructivisme, la teoria de gèneres, la lingüística sistèmica-funcional i la teoria de l'activitat històricocultural.

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A study of factors affecting teacher productivity, supported by case studies in teaching English as a foreign or second language from Australia, New Zealand, China, South Korea, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. This is a commercial version of Thorold May's doctoral dissertation."

"Asian countries with Confucian heritage culture (CHC) such as China,
Vietnam, Singapore, Korea and Japan have been proven to share characteristics of a collectivist society. Researchers agree that this collectivist mentality strongly supports cooperation that CHC’s learners/workers best perform in groups.

However, little is known about the other side of the coin. Whilst applying a method born in one culture to another, cultural differences have been forgotten. The so-called global application has led to a situation in which a Western model is forced to launch in a completely new and different context. This new context and the existing cultural values are not always incorporated into the implementation of a Western concept of cooperative learning. Consequently, it does not necessarily follow that all forms of cooperative learning will surely succeed within a CHC environment.

As a result of ignoring, stereotyping and underestimating cultural and educational characteristics, in CHC countries, the implementation of constructivism and one of its applications—cooperative learning—has ended up in failures, suspicion or resistance.

The authors would like to question (1) the fixed assumption that “groupwork
surely works in CHC countries” and (2) the domination of developmentalism
in education nowadays and its mismatch with cultural assets. With this paper, the authors contribute to the recent call for culturally appropriate pedagogy"

"Under pressure of the continuing need to modernize, Vietnam is rapidly reforming its education system. Cooperative Learning (CL) with a Western-based model is being enthusiastically applied. This paper suggests that an authentic form of CL has long existed in the foundations of Vietnamese education. The reasons why Western-based CL is encouraged can be attributed to false universalism (the belief that a practice that originated from elsewhere can be “cloned” with similar results) and neo-colonialism
(the perpetuation of a colonial mindset under the pressure of financial loans). While an adjusted form of CL has been suggested by previous studies to make CL culturally appropriate, this paper argues that a true hybrid form of CL which takes into account the authentic CL will have more potential to make this method not only culturally but institutionally appropriate. The paper indicates a strong need to identify and incorporate indigenous practice in the process of educational reform."