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Reflection Paper

Yüksel Duygu Özturkut

Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University

Fle-285: Language and Culture

Prof. Dr. Abdullah Cendel KARAMAN

January 6, 2022
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Reflection Paper

In this reflection paper, I am going to share my ideas and reflections on each four chapters

that I have read in the Language and Culture course.

Week 7 (Jandt, F. P. (2010): Barriers to Intercultural Communication)

In this chapter, I got aware of the barriers to intercultural communications. Before reading

this chapter, I was assuming that I do all the things correctly when I was communicating with my

friends from international area. However, now I guess that this is not the case, especially in terms of

the ‘’Assuming Similarity Instead of Differences’’ thing. I used to think that if we focus more on

similarities rather than differences, we will find our common values and get closer, we will

communicate easily, but in that way, I guess I was being a bit offensive against my foreigner friends.

For example, I thought what I was doing in greetings was commonly accepted by all the people in

the world.

A point that I myself experienced was ‘’Anxiety’’. I remember myself first time talking English

to someone whose native language is English, I was so anxious that even though I knew I had to do

it, I postponed it several times, avoided interacting with others and pulled myself back with an

intense feeling of hesitation, which made me gain nothing but even more anxiety.

Another point that had my attention was Ethnocentrism. Especially after the example of

‘’showing emotions’’, I found myself a bit Ethnocentric, to be honest. Because when I cannot get a

hint from people’s facial expressions, I used to get frustrated regardless of the other person’s

cultural norms because I used to think that they are not interested in what I am telling and that is

why they show no emotions.

Also, having thought of the effect of extreme nationalism, I think people should focus more

on individuals rather than their nations or even their locations (like labeling them ‘’the Eastern’’ or
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‘’the Western’’) as this may kill the core of interculturalism and remove the potential rich diversity

that might arise from intercultural communication.

Also, I got aware of the difference between the words ‘’stereotype’’, ‘’prejudice’’ and

‘’profiling’’. The example of what we see and what we believe (Nisbett, 1980) made a great

contribution to my perception and making sense of things around me.

Additionally, I liked the idea of attributing the human brain’s attitude to people’s

assumptions and stereotypes about ‘’foreigner’’ people when what they believe and what they see

conflicts.

Week 8 (Spitzberg, B. H., & Changnon, G. (2009). Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence)

In this chapter, I learned more about Intercultural Competence and why it is necessary. To

me, the fact that many employers require intercultural competence nowadays is due to the

increasing demand for intercultural communication and transactions across the globe. Nowadays,

not only big companies but also civil people are more open and dependent to abroad. For this

reason, in order not to lose the newest improvements and to stay up-to-date, employers must

require intercultural competence so that there are no supply and demand or communication

problems between the employee and the customers. In order to create this diversity and to reach

that competence, one should internalize not only a foreign language but also the whole culture of

the customers. The best way to do this is to live in the target culture.

On this point, I think governments should supply university students with an enough amount

of tuition which they can go live, work or study abroad and not worry about their financial state. In

this way, universities would be a true place which one can raise himself/herself as a very competent

and international person. This opportunity would not only be beneficial for students and their
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competencies, but also would be beneficial for countries in the long-term as their members would

be competent and required in many areas.

Additionally, I realized that acquiring a new culture is much more complicated than I thought

it would be. Especially the schemas in this chapter were quite useful and explaining. Noticing the

differences and relations between the terms like unity vs connection, integration vs assimilation was

relatively clearer thanks to the schemas and related descriptions.

Week 10 (Interculturalism as a paradigm for thinking about diversity, Martine Abdallah‐Pretceille)

In this chapter, I was more focused on how to teach students from different cultural

backgrounds without offending them or exaggerating the differences and yet still by appreciating

multiculturality.

In my opinion, students’ cultural backgrounds should not be the main focus while teaching

but it is still useful to know their culture at least to some extent. Otherwise, the atmosphere would

be too labeling. For instance, if you focus more on the culture rather than the person, after some

point you will see every single student as the culture itself, like labeling them as ‘’the Chinese one’’

and not the unique person himself/herself. This is, from the scratch, would be wrong as it kills the

diversity in a culture and also, I think, the students from different backgrounds would feel only as a

tool for representing their culture but not as valued distinct individuals, which may lead students to

feel disconnected then.

I think, instead of trying to know the culture as a whole object, knowing its pragmatic

aspects and its reflections on the students’ manner would be a great way to react and evaluate

interculturality in the classroom because the ‘’cultural knowledge’’ as a raw knowledge may
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decrease social interactions and educational relations as it may confine the students, the so-called

‘’culture representers’’, into a certain way of acting.

Besides, nowadays we, human beings, are not one-type but we are diverse. People are not

only their cultural habits and codes. This fact is also proven by the fact that not everyone from one

culture is the same. People also describe themselves with their very varied and unique personal

traits.

In conclusion, to me, teachers should take interculturality into consideration in terms of

behaviors and manners but not as an indicator of something nor as a barrier which is sticked to the

foreigner student.

Week 11 (INTERNATIONAL STUDENT TEACHING IN WORLD

LANGUAGE EDUCATION: CRITICAL CRITERIA FOR GLOBAL TEACHERHOOD, A. Cendel Karaman

&François V. Tochon)

In this chapter, I experienced a quick preparation for my future job.

As the chapter states, I think language learning process would be incomplete without

understanding and internalizing the different culture. An example of this would be some words

which do not exist in other languages. For example, the word ‘’yakamoz’’ in Turkish language, which

means ‘’the reflection of the moonlight on the sea’’, or the word ‘’saudade’’ in Galician or

Portuguese language, which means ‘’a nostalgic feeling of longing’’. For the word ‘’yakamoz’’, maybe

because Turkey is a peninsula, words and sayings in Turkish were created around the context of sea.

Also, the cultural ways in which words are used in a language is also something language
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learners should get accustomed to. Otherwise, in my opinion, without comprehending the culture, a

language cannot be learned properly.

According to my observation that I have had through my childhood, although approximately

30 students have the same language teacher, the same curriculum and the same class, but not all of

them reach proficiency but actually very few of them do. Having observed this, I think, the impact of

the teacher himself/herself in language learning-teaching process is limited. That is why acquiring

the culture related to the foreign language is quite important. I think, this is one of the main

problems in Turkey and maybe the main reason why Turkish students are not very successful at

learning English well.

About the teacher educators and foreign language teachers’ curriculum, I agree with the

writers. Unfortunately, I do not think that intercultural relations are valued in many foreign language

teaching programs, which creates a perfect ground for the problems I talked about above. If teacher

candidates were educated with a culturally richer curricula, they would supply their students with

the appreciation of interculturalism and this would directly or indirectly increase the students’

academic success level as well as their intercultural competence.

From the experiment of Rainbow and Butterfly, I concluded that in order to be a true foreign

language teacher, prospective teachers should be accepting and appreciating different insights in

many areas of life.

References

Abdallah-Pretceille, M. (2006). Interculturalism as a paradigm for thinking about diversity.

Intercultural Education, 17 (5), 475–483.

https://odtuclass2021f.metu.edu.tr/pluginfile.php/477068/mod_resource/content/1/

Abdallah-Pretcille-Interculturalism%20as%20a%20paradigm%20for%20thinking%20about

%20diversity.pdf

Karaman, A. C., & Tochon, F. V. (2007). International student teaching in world language

education: Critical criteria for global teacherhood. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 4(2-3): 237-

264.

https://doi.org/10.1080/15427580701389714

Jandt, F. P. (2010). An introduction to intercultural communication (6th ed.). Chapter 4 –

Barriers to intercultural communication (pp. 81 – 103).

https://odtuclass2021f.metu.edu.tr/pluginfile.php/448888/mod_resource/content/1/

Barriers%20to%20Intercultural%20Communication%20-%20Jandt%202010.pdf

Spitzberg, B. H., & Changnon, G. (2009). Conceptualizing intercultural competence. In The

SAGE handbook of intercultural competence, (pp. 2-52).

https://odtuclass2021f.metu.edu.tr/pluginfile.php/459225/mod_resource/content/2/

ConceptualizingInterculturalCompetence.pdf