Chapter Highlights and Vocabulary:

Part I: Overall I enjoyed reading part one. It was mostly review from my cross-cultural psychology, nonverbal communication and educational psychology classes. I enjoyed the short stories and examples that the authors’ used the most.

Chapter 1: Multicultural education is the creation of equal educational opportunities for students from diverse racial, ethnic, social class, and cultural groups; acquisition of knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society; and interaction, negotiation, and communication with peoples from diverse groups in order to create a civic and moral community that works for the common good.

Parents who feel welcomed into the school community will be more involved and engaged in their child’s academic growth and development.

Chapter 2: Many different definitions of culture, but most mention shared behaviors, beliefs, values, attitudes and a defined group. Culture helps transmit survival and social skills from the older generation to the younger.

Each individual’s culture provides a unique lens through which to view the world and others’ actions.

Stereotyping happens when false or exaggerated characteristics of a group are attributed to an individual.

Sociotyping involves accurate generalizations about cultural groups as a whole.

Being ethnocentric presumes that one’s culture, race, ways of life and nations form the center of the world.

Chapter 3: Language and culture are inseparable. Language is a mirror of culture.

Surface culture is what is visible at first glance, food, art, history, folklore, holidays.

Deep culture involves belief systems like ethics, family relations, religion, taboos and values, proxemics, concepts of time, ceremony, medicine, marriage and sex roles and ownership systems.

Chapter 4:  America is extremely divers, but has a common mainstream set of values and culture dispersed through government, economic and educational systems and the media.

Chapter 5: Culture shock results from losing all our familiar signs or cues and ways of orienting ourselves to daily life when immersed in a different culture. It can include feelings of helplessness, fits of anger and irritability, depression, loss of appetite, poor sleep, impatience with the nationals, delay or refusal to learn host language, terrible longing to be back home and dependence on someone of your own nationality.

It usually has distinct stages. Honeymoon, Hostile, Recovery and Adjustment.

Chapter 6: Different cultures communicate verbally in different ways. High context cultures encode most of the message in the physical context or body postures and gestures. Low context cultures encode the majority of the message in the verbal communication.

Chapter 7: Nonverbal communication involves Proxemics, Kinesics, Paralinguistics, Haptics, Oculesics, Chronemics and other cues and gestures that differ with each culture.

Chapter 8: Teachers should be cognizant of their own teaching styles as well as their students’ learning styles. They should try to incorporate many different ways and opportunities for learning subject matter. They should also try to get assistance from someone who shares the same culture as a student if they are not getting through.

Part IV:

Chapter 14: Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. Top-down processing refers to the listener’s understanding of the big picture of the message using background knowledge to guess at meanings. Bottom-up processing is interpreting meaning based on the incoming data. Listening can be difficult for non native speakers because it involves understanding a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary and meaning. Factors that influence a listener’s skills are interest in topic, listener’s background knowledge of a topic, and the tendency to tune out the speaker if the listener doesn’t understand them.

Chapter 15: Games and activities are a good way to engage and get students interested in the lesson topics. A huge part of language learning is cognitive and not reflected in spoken language. Classrooms should have lots of spoken and written language available to language learners so that they can process it cognitively and learn the structure of the language. Social interaction and participation in activities that have a language component are important for language learners development. Using poems, songs, dvds, show and tell, and other activities can help develop oral language. Teachers should not spend to much time correcting language, instead they should focus on often repeated mistakes that hinder communication so that they don’t become engrained. 

Chapter 16: ELL students have trouble learning English vocabulary because the rules and semantics of English words are different than their native language. Also, They have to memorize new terms for concepts that they already know in their native language. It can be difficult to associate the new terms with the stored concepts. Vocabulary development is improved when students can use a bilingual dictionary to look up word meanings. Using songs, games, poetry, flash cards, telling stories and other fun non-threatening activities are a good way to teach vocabulary. Most words are learned through extensive reading and listening. It takes multiple exposures to a word to learn all its’ meanings. For intermediate learners, a targeted vocabulary building program of frequently used words with pronunciation and practice is helpful. Learners can also guess from the context what a word might mean.

Chapter 18: The most important part of this chapter to me were the writing stages. Prewriting, Drafting, Revising, Editing and Publishing. This is the meat of our entire experience at Apache. Writing is a creative social process that helps children not only organize their own thoughts, but provides a way to express ideas and views in a concrete way. I had never thought about publishing as part of the writing process, but I like including it because to me it shows that the children’s experience and words have lasting value and are important. I think it is a very positive, reaffirming way to conclude the writing process. I found that for me it also motivated me to do a better job than I would have otherwise. When you know your work is going to end up in print, you want people to have a good opinion of it and make a greater effort to ensure that it is good quality.