New Perspectives on Intercultural Language Research and Teaching

Exploring Learners’ Understandings of Texts from Other Cultures

Melina Porto, Michael Byram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317204602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Illustrated by an empirical study of English as a Foreign Language reading in Argentina, this book argues for a different approach to the theoretical rationales and methodological designs typically used to investigate cultural understanding in reading, in particular foreign language reading. It presents an alternative approach which is more authentic in its methods, more educational in its purposes, and more supportive of international understanding as an aim of language teaching in general and English language teaching in particular.

1 Reading and Cultural Understanding

DOI: 10.4324/9781315562520-1

Conceptualising Reading, Identity, Culture and Schema

Reading in any language, whether L1 or a foreign language, is complex. People read for different purposes in particular contexts and circumstances, and respond in individually significant ways to different texts. They unconsciously draw on their cultural and linguistic backgrounds as well as their past experiences, beliefs and emotions. They use their imagination. So what a reader gets from a text is always personal and specific, and in some aspects unique. Language itself also contributes to this process because of the complexity of meanings, which change over time but also have shifting connotations. At one and the same time, language is “a carrier and [a] shaper of individual and group identities” (Guiora, 2005: 185) that affects how people read. Who the reader is in terms of ethnicity, nationality, gender, social class, religion, etc. contributes to his/her understanding of a text. Writers from different disciplines have pointed out that it is hard to get from a text (or a situation, an experience) more than what one is willing or able to know (Archer, 1997; Derrida, 1994; Gadamer, 1992; Moreiras, 1991). There is a limit to what is understood because people tend to disregard what they do not understand. This means that no interpretation can be other than provisional. Let us call this a sociocultural view of reading.

A sociocultural view of reading takes into account the individual and the social. Individuals see themselves in particular ways as a result of a reading experience, and each reading experience plays a role in their identifications and positionings in their own society (McCarthey and Moje, 2002; Tsui, 2007). Identifications are multiple, hybrid, complex, fluid and contradictory (de Nooy, 2006; Genetsch, 2007; Norton, 2000; Norton and Toohey, 2011; Rosaldo, 1993), and this means it is always possible, in any reading experience, to enact simultaneously more than one identification depending on the relationships, interactions and identifications in the life of an individual that are foregrounded. This continuous construction of cultural identifications relates to the concept of ‘performativity’, particularly associated with the work of the philosopher Judith Butler. Identifications are seen as “rehearsals” in “temporary identifications” (Butler, 1997: 266) and all individuals can construct their identities differently at different points in time. Identity is not an essence.

The social dimension of a sociocultural perspective involves a conceptualisation of ‘culture’. However, the concept is usually too vague and complex (Byram and Grundy, 2002; Kramsch, 1995). From an anthropological standpoint, culture refers to the ways in which people conceive their lives and attribute importance to human experience by selecting and organising it. Culture is everywhere and mediates all human behaviour (Rosaldo, 1993). Our actions, thoughts and feelings are culturally determined and are influenced by our biography, the social situation and the historical context (Rosaldo, 1993).

The individual and the social interact. Individuals build their own stories, but on the basis of conditions which are not of their choice and which exceed their control. The complexity of cultural understanding lies in the fact that social life is simultaneously inherited and in permanent movement. The individual and the idiosyncratic mingle with, and cannot be separated from, the social. Such a dynamic conception of culture emphasises processes rather than facts, distances itself from monolithic and static perspectives, and highlights the concept of social construction.

Several other concepts from cultural anthropology (Rosaldo, 1993) are useful for the purposes of this book. One is that each culture is so unique that it is impossible to evaluate one as in some sense ‘better’ than another, because, it is argued, no culture is superior or inferior, richer or poorer, bigger or smaller than any other. The concept of ‘cultural visibility’ is also important and refers to the notion that certain human phenomena may appear to be more susceptible of cultural analysis than others. This is related to the idea of ‘difference’. ‘Difference’ helps to make cultures visible to external observers, for instance those who read a text from another cultural background. At the same time, ‘differences’ are problematic because they are relative to and determined by the cultural practices of observers. We see what is ‘different’ from what we know in our own culture and tend to overlook everything else. As Genetsch (2007: x) puts it: Finally, in theoretical approaches to understanding there is the crucial notion of ‘schema’. As an abstract knowledge structure that represents generic concepts stored in memory (Anderson and Pearson, 1984; Rumelhart and Ortony, 1977) schemata have been given different names such as ‘frame’ (Minsky, 1975), ‘script’ (Schank and Abelson, 1977), ‘plan’ (Schank, 1975, 1982) and ‘macrostructure’ (Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978). Historically, the notion of schema referring to the structure of human knowledge as represented in memory can be traced to Plato, Aristotle and Kant in philosophy, and Bartlett and Piaget in psychology (McVee, Dunsmore and Gavelek, 2005). In a sociocultural perspective on schemata (ibid.) the contributions of Kant and Bartlett are particularly relevant because they stress the developmental, social and cultural dimensions of schemata, not only what happens within individuals’ minds. Kant (1929) refers to schemata as mediating structures which link an individual’s mental structures with the external world. Bartlett (1932) prefers the term ‘pattern’ and also highlights the functional role of schemata as adaptations between individuals and the environment. The underlying idea is that “schemas were necessary to explain the constitutive role of culturally organized experience in individual sense making” (McVee et al., 2005: 535). This view of schemata will allow us to inspect the functioning of schemata in experience with literary texts and reveals the nature of reading in a particular sociocultural context, in this case from Argentina.

difference is a category which can be filled differently (…) difference is no intrinsic quality or an objective factor in a social relationship but the definition of such a relationship. The decision to regard someone as different is always a positioning or an interpretation.

Diverging Views of Reading, Identity, Culture and Schema

The sociocultural view of reading is at odds with the position taken by studies such as the one that used the ‘Kayatuq—the red fox’ text in our Introduction. The use of a recall task as an instrument for investigating reading implies a view of reading in which text interpretation is fixed, predetermined and standardised. Because a reader is thought to have comprehended a text when there is sufficient agreement between his or her recall and the text itself, there is no room for personal readings; for the enactment of specific, simultaneous (and perhaps conflicting) identifications; for the consideration of ‘difference’ as a positioning; and culture as dynamic and evolving. There is no room either for acknowledging the fact that what is visible for one reader can be invisible for another, even within the same social and cultural group, because of their unique and idiosyncratic perspectives. By contrast, whatever is different from the ‘Kayatuq—the red fox’ text in a recall is seen as deviant, culturally distorted and lacking in understanding. Schemata are seen as static and as phenomena that occur exclusively in a reader’s head: In this view, an individual reader either has the schema needed to interpret a text, or not. The dichotomy is between available versus unavailable schemata, present versus absent schemata.

Schemas, as traditionally conceived in relation to reading, were limited to in-the-head categories, in part because they were removed from materiality connected to cultural context and processes.

(McVee et al., 2005: 546)

Despite the contributions of Kant, Bartlett and others mentioned above, the sociocultural perspective on schemata has become lost in contemporary conceptions. The reason for this can be traced to work by cognitive scientists in the 1970s in artificial intelligence (Minsky, 1975; Schank and Abelson, 1977) which involved the exploration of knowledge construction using computers in the laboratory. Other scholars applied and developed this work in the analysis of reading in the late 1970s and during the 1980s, producing a vast amount of research that contributed to foregrounding the cognitive paradigm of schema theory (Anderson, 1977; Anderson and Pearson, 1984; Bransford and Johnson, 1972, 1973; Rumelhart, 1975, 1980). On the other hand, the marginalisation of the sociocultural in favour of the cognitive and the individual does not mean that the social and cultural dimensions were not explored at all. Anderson (2004, study undertaken in 1984), Harris, Lee, Hensley and Schoen (1988), Lipson (1983), Pritchard (1990), Reynolds, Taylor, Steffensen, Shirey and Anderson (1982), Steffensen, Joag-Dev and Anderson (1979) and others investigated the influence of cultural background and background knowledge, acknowledging the power of social and cultural factors in reading comprehension. However, as McVee et al. (2005) point out, in these studies cultural variations were taken as an independent variable in reading rather than as a constitutive and integral component of schemata in their own right. These empirical investigations portrayed an impoverished and limited conception of culture, in dissonance with the complex views that were emerging from the fields of anthropology, cultural psychology and educational anthropology in the 1980s.

In later chapters, we shall recover the social and the cultural dimensions of schemata and show that cultural schemata are not a static characteristic of an individual’s cognition, not an in-the-head phenomenon, but rather are shared by members of a cultural group, are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated through time and generations, and are instantiated in cultural artefacts such as reflective narratives, drawings and interviews. Before doing so, however, we shall analyse more closely the characteristics of those studies which introduced a sociocultural approach so that the characteristics of our approach become more evident by contrast and comparison.

Culture as an Independent Variable

Some studies which investigate the role of cultural background in text comprehension and use cultural differences as an independent variable focus on texts read in English as mother tongue, second language or foreign language. Others explore texts in other second and foreign languages such as Hebrew (Abu-Rabia, 1996, 1998), Spanish (Martínez-Roldán and Sayer, 2006), Italian (Hammadou, 1991) and French (Hammadou, 1991).

The studies that focus on English as a second/foreign language (ESL) have shown that ESL readers have a better understanding and recall of texts for which they have a relevant culturally-specific content schema (Chihara, Sakurai and Oller, 1989; Malik, 1990; Sasaki, 2000; Van Hell, Bosman, Wiggers and Stoit, 2003).

There are two types of study here. One is referred to as cross-cultural research because informants belong to two differen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Research in Education
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Reading and Cultural Understanding
• 2 A Model of Cultural Understanding of Texts
• 3 Using the Model of Cultural Understanding in Text Selection and Analysis
• 4 Analysing Comprehension of Texts in Readers’ First Language
• 5 Developing New Instruments for Research and Teaching
• 6 The Reading Response Task and Foreign Language Texts
• 7 The Visual Representation Task and Foreign Language Texts
• 8 Using the Model of Cultural Understanding in Self-Assessment
• 9 Conclusions
• Appendix: Literary extracts used in this book
• Index