Search

The attainment of a cultural identity is a major challenge of social development for many children from minority groups in today's fast-changing multicultural societies. Culturo-metrics is a new area of research that teachers and researchers can use to measure cultural identity and to explore culturally preferred behaviors of children and teachers in multicultural classrooms. Multiculturalism has made ethnicity, as a nominal category, an unreliable indicator of cultural identity and culturally determined behaviors. This is because ethnic groups within multicultural societies influence each other's identities and culturally determined behaviors. This finding has emerged from a 4-year comparative ethnographic study of English teaching practices between Fiji's two main ethnic groups, the indigenous Fijians and the Indo-Fijians. For example, children and teachers in one cultural group borrow more effective behaviors from other cultural groups. One's cultural identity then becomes a composite identity evidencing the cultural influences from society's other cultural groups. This composite cultural identity is measured by the more sensitive Cultural Index (CI). The CI was first used to determine composite cultural identities of English teachers in Fiji and to assess the degree of cultural borrowing between native Fijian teachers and Indo-Fijian teachers to explain and predict their culturally defined teaching behaviors. (Author)

Economic globalization make it increasingly important for Caribbean professionals to be able to communicate effectively in English, French, and Spanish. Accordingly, the University of Technology in Jamaica is developing French and Spanish courses designed to teach culturally appropriate and successful communication for specific professions. The design of these courses is radically different from the traditional university courses in both subject content and teaching methodology in order to accommodate the specific practical communication demands now placed on professionals in the Caribbean. This paper discusses the crucial importance of introducing specific occupational foreign language courses to equip undergraduate students with the fundamental foreign language skills necessary to function competently in linguistically diverse Caribbean work environments. It explains how linguistic competence is achieved by designing foreign language courses, using discipline-oriented lexical registers, content-based simulated situations, and nonconformist communicative contextual foreign language teaching methodology. Two illustrative examples of occupational French or Spanish course development for hotel and tourism management are described, highlighting the practical relevance of their course contents and teaching methodology to hotel and tourism management. (Contains 25 references.) (Author/KFT)

This paper explains how oral competence in foreign languages is developed by applying constructivist pedagogic methodology to the four language skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Foreign language constructivist methodology departs from the information processing model and behaviorist teaching that guide the transmission of foreign language teaching. In contrast, the learner-centered pedagogic approach inherent to foreign language constructivism is geared to enhancing self-directed learning and to promoting foreign language communicative competence through authentic language use in the classroom. This methodology endorses current positive foreign language pedagogic values, such as authenticity and collaboration and the encouragement of active engagement in learning. This is primarily achieved through the use of thematically-focused communicative activities, which create energizing living experiences in the foreign language. This paper shows how to use these affect-structuring techniques of emotional anchors, motivators, and cognitive direction to design these constructivist foreign language experiences and gives practical examples of their application in a multicultural, multi-ability and multi-age French class. (Author/KFT)

This paper utilizes a grounded narrative to report characteristics of teaching that are most culturally Fijian. Grounded narrative is a data reduction methodology of qualitative reporting evidenced by the data. It is used to portray vividly and authentically the Fijian educational setting by highlighting the salient cultural characteristics that typify Fijian teaching. The paper depicts a fictitious culturally-extreme Fijian rural school, an ideal type. This description effectively highlights the sociocultural determinants of Fijian school ethos by reporting extreme aspects of English teaching and daily school management. The first part of the narrative described the school's main physical and management features. The second part focused on the teaching and learning of English in the Fijian rural context. The teachers' methodological strategies for teaching English are outlined. It is concluded that systematic teaching of students to the Fijian national English examination is inimical to broader pedagogical objectives, because it ignores the fact that English is not the language of daily life. This finding has relevance for the training of teachers and managers for rural Fijian secondary schools. It underscores that teacher training, without reference to the determining socio-cultural characteristics of Fiji is unlikely to significantly broaden the pedagogy of rural English teachers and hence the English language proficiency of their students. Contains 40 references. (KFT)

This paper introduces the Cultural Index (CI), which is composed of grounded indices for measuring cultural identity and predicting culturally-determined behaviors. These behaviors often are associated with ethnicity, which researchers have used as a predictor of culturally-defined behaviors. This use posits that ethnicity defines culture. However, this is not so in multicultural societies where ethnic groups influence each other's culturally-determined behaviors by sometimes borrowing more effective behaviors and sometimes marking their separate identity by emphasizing differential behaviors. This paper describes the CI and how to calculate it. It is supported by ethnographic data from a 4-year long comparative study of native Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Gives illustrative examples of CI use. Contains a 10-item bibliography. (Author/BT)