Session 69: Cultural Proficiency for Japanese Language Learners: What Is Cultural Proficiency and How Can It Be Measured?

Organizer and Chair: Hiroaki Kawamura, University of Findlay

Discussant: Patricia J. Wetzel, Portland State University

Keywords: pedagogy, Japanese, cultural proficiency, assessment, cultural theory.

Foreign language pedagogy has recognized culture as an integral aspect of language instruction (e.g., Hymes 1972, Kramsch 1993, National Standards 1996). Several scholars have proposed to develop an instrument to assess learners’ cultural skills (Makino 2003). Yet discussion of cultural proficiency is constrained by the lack of a common theoretical grounding. This panel aims to take the first steps in the development of a common ground for cultural skills measurement. Building upon the common theoretical notion of performance (e.g., Goffman 1959, Ochs 1988, Hanks 1996, Walker and Noda 2000), speakers will examine such questions as, "What is cultural proficiency and what aspects of culture should be measured?" "How do existing proficiency exams integrate culture?" "How can cultural skills be measured using currently available techniques and technologies in and outside of a classroom?" Drawing from such disciplines as anthropology, cognitive science, sociolinguistics, and language pedagogy, speakers will discuss findings from their ongoing practice of teaching and research projects. Kawamura’s paper will define the concept of cultural proficiency combining the theoretical frameworks of the concept of culture in various disciplines. Noda will examine the hands-on evaluation of cultural skills in a classroom setting. Watanabe, drawing on her experience as a certified trainer, will review the ACTFL (American Council of Teaching Foreign Languages) OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) and its capacity for assessing factors that fall outside the normal purview of linguistic accuracy. Finally, Falsgraf will examine how technology-mediated assessments can measure learners’ cultural skills.

Cultural Proficiency: A Definition for Language Learners

Hiroaki Kawamura, The University of Findlay

This paper will propose some theoretical scaffolding for the measurement of cultural proficiency. Makino (2003) proposes that we need a theory of "second culture acquisition" and suggests developing a cultural proficiency test with uchi (inside) and soto (outside) as the guiding principle. But there is no recognition in his proposal of the ongoing argumentation over the definition, indeed, the very nature of "culture." This paper contributes to the discussion of cultural proficiency measurement by offering some provisional definitions of fundamental concepts. It begins with the recognition that critical theory has shed light on the fluid nature of culture and the political nature of human involvement in the process of cultural emergence (e.g., Bourdieu 1990, Giddens 1979). Linguistic anthropology has much to offer in viewing culture as it manifests itself through the process of human communication (e.g., Duranti 1994). Sociobiology and cognitive science continue to challenge the assumed boundaries between nature and nurture (e.g., Wilson 1978, Tomasello 1999). Taking the notion of language as "performance" (e.g., Goffman 1959, Ochs 1988, Walker and Noda 2000), we might conclude that cultural proficiency should be measured in performative terms. Drawing on anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and language pedagogy, this paper will examine four fundamental questions, namely, (1) what is cultural proficiency for language learners? (2) what does a cultural proficiency test measure? (3) what does such testing predict? and (4) what are the benefits of such measurement for language teachers and learners?

Assessing Performed Culture in a Language Classroom

Mari Noda, Ohio State University

Study of a modern foreign language is study of culture as a lived experience. Culture natives accumulate from their daily experiences collective memory, which in turn shapes their future experiences and the memory that arises from those future experiences. Thus, Bruner (1996) claims that "learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting and always dependent upon the utilization of cultural resources" (p. 4). Language learners move through an ever-evolving cycle of accumulating cultural memory by experiencing an ever-widening range of performed culture, utilizing available cultural resources. To the extent that a language teacher can stage target cultural experiences for the learners, it is possible for that teacher to measure the ability of language learners to perform in the target culture. This presentation proposes a four-stage process of assessing a language learner’s target cultural performance. The first stage is the establishment of evaluation criteria that measure the degree to which learners can successfully engage members of the target culture in their experiences, rather than simply assessing what information they can process. The second stage involves the elicitation of cultural performances through a series of contextualized activities. The third stage is the actual evaluation of the performances, using the established criteria. In the fourth stage, the teacher and the learner engage in a meta-cognitive discussion about the performance and the evaluation. I will outline the advantages of continuous evaluation over sporadic testing as well as the challenges inherent in such an evaluation mode.

References: Bruner, Jerome. 1996. The Culture of Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Cultural Skills in the Context of OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview)

Suwako Watanabe, Portland State University

Communicative competence, the ability to function appropriately in communicative events in a society (Hymes 1972), is rightly recognized as an integral part of culture. Linguistic skills are inseparable from cultural skills. The Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) evaluates one area of communicative competence: speaking proficiency. But whereas the OPI provides a common yardstick to measure speaking proficiency across languages, it de-emphasizes differences among languages and in doing so misses important generalizations about proficiency and assessment. I will examine language use characteristic of Japanese, focusing on two OPI criteria: accuracy and text type. The first of these, accuracy (including pragmatic and sociolinguistic accuracy), "refers to the acceptability, quality and precision of the message conveyed" (Swender 1999). The more advanced the level, the more cultural appropriateness is expected; to face threatening communicative tasks (e.g., reporting an accident) requires linguistic devices that frame propositional messages in such a way that the message is acceptable to the listener. The second, text type, refers to reasonably well-defined units of discourse, and cultural differences emerge in how speakers structure information and signal parts of discourse organization. This paper examines strategies for coherence (specifically, employing appropriate predicate endings and discourse markers). It raises new questions about the link between formal features and cultural appropriateness and interpretability. The revealed strategies are peculiar in terms of both their formal features and their cultural significance. I suggest, too, that the production of interpretable discourse cannot always be attributed to factors that are common across languages.

Developing and Measuring Emergent Cultural Competence

Carl D. Falsgraf, University of Oregon

This paper will argue for a particular approach to culture and discuss how new technologies allow us to develop and measure the acquisition of culture. The paper will borrow Makino’s (2003) definition of culture as "various patterns of communication acquired, shared, and transmitted by members of a given society." It will build on this concept with insights from sociobiology (e.g., Wilson 1978) and research on chaos theory and complexity (Johnson 2001, Lewin 1992). In this view, culture is an epi-phenomenon emerging from a complex set of probabilistic individual interactions. Because the individual interactions are probabilistic, culture itself is not a fixed set of rules, but a dynamic and creative result of individual behavior. This view of culture applied to second-language learning suggests that contextualized authentic materials, which display these individual interactions, are crucial to the acquisition and assessment of cultural competence. Online delivery of these materials—including conversations, media clips, and written texts—facilitates the appropriate use of authentic materials and provides teachers with opportunities to display the target culture more frequently and accurately than in the past. For example, online delivery of assessments allows for computer adaptive features that react to learners’ performance and present learners with items suited to their proficiency levels and particular profile of sub-skills, including cultural competence.