Multicultural Environments Flashcards
Competency 009
The ESL teacher understands factors that affect ESL students’ learning and implements strategies for creating an effective multicultural and multilingual learning environment.
Cultural/linguistic diversity
r
Respect for language differences
r
Socio-cultural factors
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Student factors (age, cultural backgrounds, learning styles, personalities, home environment, attitude)
r
Culture
Culture is the shared beliefs, values, and rule governed patterns of behavior that define a group.”
Surface culture vs. Deep culture
Surface culture is essentially the cultural norms you can easily identify in a foreign country: language, clothing, food, customs, art, etc.
Deep culture are the cultural norms not easily detected unless, in fact, you are born and raised in that specific culture OR you spend an extended amount of time in the foreign culture. Deep culture includes beliefs, norms and values.
Multicultural learning
Multicultural learning integrates and explores the rich tapestry of perspectives reflected in our diverse world. It occurs when differences among learners are both valued and explored. Multicultural learning recognizes and reaches across boundaries of ability, age, class, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation and other personal, social and cultural identities so that learners will more thoroughly understand the multifaceted dimensions of knowledge.
Stereotypes
Stereotypes (or “characterizations”) are generalizations or assumptions that people make about the characteristics of all members of a group, based on an image (often wrong) about what people in that group are like.
Symbolic interactionists
Symbolic interactionists limit their analysis of education to what they directly observe happening in the classroom. They focus on how teacher expectations influence student performance, perceptions, and attitudes.
