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2/17/22; Week 7: Response to "Culture and Psychology".

  “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”. —Attributed to Albert Einstein The video mentions the relationship between the “ought-self” which can be what people are expected to be within their society and the “real-self” which is who they are based on their attributes, skills, talents and passions affects their self-esteem and how they view themselves. And that is exactly what the above quotation is trying to teach because many times social culture affects the individual’s psychology. Professor Ivers, in the video, invites students to think and talk about examples where they have seen how people have irrational cultural “ought-self” beliefs that makes people feel miserable for not meeting those standards. And thought about what happens back home, from a young age we are taught that we need to go to college and get a degree in order to be someone in life. Basically, our worth is based on
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2/15/22; Week 7: Response to “Difference in Manners"

  Has it ever happened to you that you were abroad or among foreigners and did something that was offensive to them but back home was something normal? Prior to my mission in Canada, I had heard that in some Asian countries it is customary that people take off their shoes when entering a house, but what I didn’t know was that taking the shoes off wasn’t enough, besides leaving the shoes at the entrance, people should not show their bare feet because it’s seen as very disrespectful in their culture. So, there is innocent me, brand new missionary, walking into this Filipino family’s, I take off my flat shoes which I used to wear without socks and I start making my way into the living room in bare foot when this horrified wife comes running holding a pair of slippers asking me to wear because they shouldn’t see my feet. I was so embarrassed, but I learned my lesson. Just as what happened to me with this family, there are different manners around the world. What can be considered accep
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2/15/22; Week 7: Response to "Cross-Cultural Students in the Classroom”

The most exciting characteristic of a TESOL classroom is its cultural diversity. Cross-cultural students can come from different parts of a same country or from different countries. It’s interesting to see that the way students behave in class are influenced by their cultural background, this also affects how they perceive their peers and teachers. The Professor in the video gives an example about how American students walking into the classroom late without apologizing come across as rude for Japanese students, who highly respect teachers and other professionals. Having Peru, a very conservative society, I grew up acknowledging that my teachers were important figures in my academic life and I needed to be respectful to them. I remember that back in Elementary and all the way to High School, my classmates and I had to stand up every time a teacher or the school principal would walk in; learning that students don’t do that in other places is shocking for me. Not that I want to be resp
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2/11/22; Week 6: Response to "Attributional tendencies in Cultures".

  Have you ever come across people who blame bad luck or others’ mistakes for their own lack of success? Or people who are hard on themselves and blame themselves for whatever happens? I have and I myself have been the latter many times. This week I learned that this tendence to look for whoever or whatever responsible for the situations we are going through is called “making attributions”, which are inferences we make to understand the causes of events and behavior and they can heavily influence the way we interact with others. Attributions can be internal which means that the cause of the outcome is within the individual due to personality traits, talents or mistakes; or external which means that somebody else takes the responsibility, Also, attributions can be stable, or in other words, constant over a period of time; or unstable, that could change any time. Knowing these dimensions can help us understand students’ behavior and even expectations. Something that drew my attention w
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2/7/22; Week 6: Response to "Individualism vs Collectivism".

Watching the video taught me that there are different factors that affect the way people act and one of them has to do with whether they grew up in an individualist society or collectivist society. In individualist societies people are encouraged to be independent and individualist from a young age. Americans, for example, tell their children to do their own things and own up their mistakes; in fact, individual mistakes are tolerated in these kinds of societies. However, in cultures that are collectivist, there is little tolerance for mistakes that could affect the group, decisions that affect the family for example, need to be consulted with family members. These cultural differences can affect the way students reach out for help in class, their attitude towards class and how they perceive team work. The potential misunderstandings that might come up in a culturally diverse TESOL classroom are many, for example, the outcome of a team work activity can be either successful or not d
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2/6/22; Week 6: Response to "Differences in Emotional Expressivity"

  Cultural misinterpretation can also be caused by differences in emotional expressivity. For example: Public display of affection is seen as socially rude in Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, while being public affectionate is completely normal in Western cultures. Which reminded me that these differences can also be seen within people of the same country but from different regions. For example: In Peru, my home country, people from the Andean cities tend to be blunter and more passionate when sharing their opinions than people from coastal cities, who are more chill and laid back. I feel that being aware of how people express their emotions according to their cultural background can help teachers create a better classroom environment for low affective filter as well as understand better students’ attitudes and behavior in order to adapt their assessment activities based on how they express their emotions and perceive others’ emotions. The question is how can teachers tell what is
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2/5/22; Week 5: Response to "Cultural Miscommunication"

At the beginning of this semester, we read what David E. Purpel (1989) said about education “[…If there is no serious connection between education and hunger, injustice, alienation, poverty, and war, then we are wasting our time, deluding each other, and breaking faith]”. And this is not foreign to the TESOL field, especially because the purpose of students from different parts of the world learning English is that they can break that language barrier and communicate with native English speakers and others that speak English and with whom we wouldn’t be able to communicate otherwise and so, interacting at all levels worldwide. In one of the videos, we learn that miscommunication can cause different problems, including conflict and even war. I feel that the greatest opportunity that comes along with learning a foreign language is learning about foreign cultures because communication is not only about the words you say but the way you say them. Having students learn about these diffe
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