DN24 Conference - Charles Brown: The Nature of Culture Implicit in Materials for Japanese English...

Описание: Charles Brown, Professor at Purdue University, Indiana, USA, talks about The Nature of Culture Implicit in Materials for Japanese English Education (Panel 1C - Professional and Corporate discourses as propaganda).

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

Japanese policy makers have seized upon English education as a tool to foster internationalization. A cursory examination of school English textbooks used in Japan would suggest much success along these lines: They contain information about foreign locales and the people there with characters from outside of Japan populating the practice dialogs. Nevertheless, the question of how well such materials present culture remains mostly unknown. Addressing the paucity of research on this important topic, the work presented here delved beyond the surface, or stated curriculum, in order to foster a fuller understanding of how such materials and those teaching them actually present the nature of culture. My specific research question was simple: What inaccuracies exist in presentations of the nature of culture implicit in teaching materials used in Japanese elementary-12 contexts? I conducted a corpus analysis of English teaching materials from these contexts by collecting hundreds of teacher lesson plans and text excerpts involving culture. In my analysis, I used these materials to inductively build a picture of the attributes of culture. Findings indicate that these materials reinscribed “folk beliefs,” implicitly presenting culture as equated with the nation-state, as pure and uniform, as unchanging, as mostly limited to artifacts and displays rather than (possibly subtle) norms of behavior, and as being universally positive rather than as possibly causing misunderstandings and conflict. These results suggest that policy-makers and teachers in Japan must work to present the nature of culture more accurately so as to better prepare students for the real world.