Chapter Three Literature Review
3.5. The Courses under Exploration: Argumentative Writing and Cross-Cultural Understanding
3.5.4. Cross-Cultural Understanding Course: Critical Features and its Pedagogical Practice Atkinson (1999) maintained that language (learning and teaching) and culture are mutually
79 were enrolled in a Writing IV course. The four stages enacted by the researchers were
“planning, implementing, observing and evaluating” (p.85). The findings, as the authors claimed, seemed to suggest that process approaches “successfully increased the students’
writing ability as well as their enjoyment of the learning process” (p.83).
Other studies combined the principles of process and genre approaches in teaching writing (see Kim and Kim (2005), for example). All the above studies still sit within the dominant practices and do not provide alternative forms such as argumentative writing in the Chinese context (Singh & Fu, 2008) which allows flowery rhetoric and inductive writing style. Hence the studies above did not present “multi-centred social sciences” approaches (Connell, 2007, p.230). This seemed to be the dominant effect of systematised and institutionalised academic writing in the global North which is then imported to the global South (see Muchiri et al 1995;
Canagarajah, 2002c).
3.5.4. Cross-Cultural Understanding Course: Critical Features and its Pedagogical Practice
80 Byram (1997) developed an intercultural model based on five savoirs. This model, as argued by Zotzmann (2015), is the “most influential intercultural model” (p.173). These savoirs represent “knowledge of social groups and their products and practices in one’s interlocutor’s country, and of general process of societal and individual interactions” (Byram, 1997, p.58).
They are: savoir compendre (skills to interpret and relate), savoir engager (political education and critical cultural awareness), savoir appendre/faire (skills to discover and/or interact), and two forms of savoir etre, knowledge and attitude. The knowledge category includes an understanding of self and other, which includes interaction with individuals and societal contexts. The ‘attitude’ category includes the willingness to relativise oneself and value others. Byram’s (1997) assumption that language learners are willing to relativise themselves and value others suggests that he desires intercultural learning to work under the progression model. I have elsewhere critiqued Byram’s (1997) savoirs as they do not allow more nuanced and complex understanding of intercultural language learning (Wahyudi, 2016a). Byram’s (1997) savoir etre (attitude of curiosity and openness) assumes that people learning other cultures will be curious and open. In that respect, Byram also closed the possibility of people’s refusal to be open to the other culture (Wahyudi, 2016a). Thus Byram in some way, aligned with the essentialist group.
Liddicoat, Papadametre, Scarino, and Kohler (2003) (cited in Liddicoat, 2004) suggested five principles for language teaching and learning using intercultural perspectives. These are:
“active construction, making connections, social interaction, reflection, and responsibility”
(p.20). The active construction suggests that learners need to create their own knowledge about their own culture and the culture they are learning as a part of personal development.
In making connections, the students are encouraged to relate their understanding of their own culture and knowledge to what they learn in the classroom. Social interaction suggests that students learn culture by communicating with others. In the reflection category, the students are required to reflect “positively” or “negatively” (p.20) on the culture they have encountered as well as the possible impact on the knowledge of understanding self and others. Responsibility requires the students to be responsible for “successful communication”
in all languages and for developing understanding which respects “other languages, cultures and people” (p.20). Although Liddicoat and Scarino (2013) seemed to provide more balanced views on intercultural learning as seen through “positive” and “negative” reflection, other
81 principles such as active construction, making connections, and responsibility suggest that students are seen as desiring to enact these principles. This assumption does not allow contextual contingency or other possible complexities within intercultural learning.
Working from a critical perspective, Dervin (2016) proposed ten principles of interculturality in education which covers: the need to avoid essentialising (such as ‘East versus West’), to look at exception, instability, and processes rather than ethnicities and nationalities, to promote justice, to investigate power relations as the effect of language use, social status, skin colour, and so on. Further, he emphasised the need to examine the interaction of multiple identities, and the need to go into something deep rather than the surface.
Crozet (2017) made three categories of possibilities when teaching culture in the language classroom. These are: “Traditional Culture Pedagogy (TCP)”, “Intercultural Language Pedagogy (ILP)”, and “Critical Intercultural Pedagogy (CIP)” (p.144). TCP deals with the
“uncritical” teaching of cultures rooted from “an essentialist perspective” (p.144). Teachers teaching culture in the TCP category would teach “four Fs (Foods, Fairs, Folklores, and Facts)”
(p.144). Teachers under the ILP category would teach cultures by including “some overtly political and ethical engagement”, and teachers within the CIP category suggest “an overt”
and “more militant view of intercultural perspectives” (p.144).
In Indonesian context, there is very limited study on CCU or interculturality. Gandana and Parr (2013), Gandana (2014), and Siregar (2016) were the only studies I found which discussed interculturality in Indonesian university contexts.
Gandana and Parr (2013) investigated the teaching of an Intercultural Communication course at an Indonesian University. They found that an essentialist understanding of culture, as shown in the clear cut boundary between native language and target language culture, the
“concepts of cultural conflict and adjustment”, and the notion of “the English speaking countries” suggested that culture was understood in terms of national category (p.237). This construction of culture seemed to be the example of Siregar’s (2016) study, which suggests that this essentialist view of culture in Indonesia was shaped by a political agenda to promote political unity and social harmony at the national level which resulted in the separation of language and culture in curriculum design and implementation.
82 Gandana (2014) collected data from six lecturers at two universities in West Java, Indonesia, and examined three issues: the lecturers’ understanding of themselves and their work under
“global politics of English”, the lecturers’ understanding of ‘culture’ and ‘intercultural learning’, and the manifestation of this understanding, and the lecturers’ practices “mediated by their sense of personal and professional identity as well as the wider societal and institutional cultures” (p. 246). Gandana (2014) found that there was a tendency for lecturers to relate intercultural pedagogy with the notion of “developing students’ ability to ‘shuttle’
between different spaces” which may cover “national, ethnic, and or religious boundaries”
(p.243). This was adjusted to the disciplinary courses they taught, for example the lecturer of Indonesian History and Culture emphasised “interethnic understanding” while the lecturer who taught Intercultural Communication foregrounded “national entity” as the focus of analysis. Furthermore, Gandana found that lecturers’ institutions were seen “to play an important role in shaping their knowledge and practices and in mediating the ways they enacted the curriculum” (p.243). In the curriculum of the University of West Java, which constituted “conser[ving], preser[ving], and develop[ing] cultural and religious values”, the teaching practices of three teachers affiliated with this university were oriented toward
“one’s identity and belonging” which was then mobilised to understand others. In the Indonesian National University, which emphasised internationalisation, three teachers affiliated with this university tended to construct their intercultural teaching according to the
“global aspect of interculturality” (p.243).
Siregar (2016) investigated English language policy and practices related to intercultural communicative competence at a private university in Indonesia. She conducted a document analysis of English Language Education Policy (ELEP), followed by the examination of the relationship of ELEP with a focus on the relationship between language and culture as reflected in teachers’ and students’ beliefs. Then she made an auto-ethnographic reflection on teaching a Speaking Course. Siregar found the special status accorded to English17 and the cultivation of respect for cultural diversity. She also found that her intercultural approach to teaching a Speaking Course was constrained by the imposition of linguistic goals of the
17 There is no further explanation which varieties of English was privileged but former studies suggest that they are Inner circle Englishes (Dardjowijojo, 2000; Lauder, 2008).
83 curriculum, the inavailability of “in-house community of practice” and diverse forms of classroom behaviour (p.i).