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TASK
2 (5 points) Due date: October 25th (first part: the
experiment in your family) and then November 3rd (second part:
the experiment with American students).
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How
to prepare for the Trinity
college students' visit (or, if we have no Trinity
students, for your conversation in a pub or bookstore with an
American)?
1. Accumulate background knowledge
a.
Learn about Trinity: Encyclopedia
Britannica article,
Trinity
home page (U.S. campus),
Trinity
Rome campus
... etc. (Or, learn about the life of American students your age
by visiting various university
sites and looking for a web copy the Student Newspaper.)
b.
Hypothesize what is "real", "important",
"desirable" for a typical Trinity (or, American)
student. (Not so much the concrete topics, such as
"becoming a success in life" or "rap music",
but rather the values behind these topics: "success as
redemption" or "black music as liberation".) These
values should inform your conversation. How to hypothesize what
is real for the students you will speak to? Use the
Internet to see what MTV (the U.S. not the Italian edition) and
their college newspaper are
talking about... The students you meet may espouse
or may not espouse the values you see depicted; but at least you
know what values are "real" for them (to embrace or to
avoid).
2. Create a framework to describe your
observations In our first year course, you saw several
frameworks for describing culturally-marked behavior (click
here> ).
Choose one either individually or with your Group. Then use the
Internet to find out what the author means with his/her terms.
If you have the time to do this by Friday (and if there is no bus
strike), we can discuss your framework in class.
3.
Bracket your Italian culture by testing your framework on your
family and/or circle of friends. Using your framework,
describe the members of your family as a visiting anthropologist
would. (Make hypotheses about their culture, not their individual
psychology. Culture means the value system they share with the
other people in their
social/ethnic group.) Then test your hypotheses through
ethnographic conversations with the people described. Write
your premises. observations and conclusions on a single sheet of
paper and turn it in on Monday with the Group Leader's evaluation
form. For the CRITERIA USED TO
EVALUATE YOUR ESSAY, click below.
Form
for the Group Leader to fill out by October 25th>
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TASK
3 and 4 (10 points) Due date: November 3rd
4.
Interact with the American students on Wednesday (if
any come) or, in the following days, in a pub or bookstore or
other "lair" in Rome where you can find American
students. Make an
audio recording. If possible, make a video recording, too
(but an audio recording is essential in either case).
For
a list of "lairs" in Rome, click here>
a.
If you intend to accommodate, before the encounter, use your
framework to prepare a list of behavioral changes you will put
into practice. During the encounter, do nothing deliberately --
just repeat your new values to yourself and do what comes
spontaneously. Record your conversation with an audio
recorder.
b. If you intend to be your Italian self in
English, before the encounter use your framework to predict what
kinds of verbal and other behavioral phenomena you think you will
see in the American students and during the encounter verify your
hypotheses by simply observing or with "indirect questions"
and even provocations. Record your conversation with an audio
recorder.
c. If you intend to be an "observer",
note the reactions of the American students to your Italian
fellow students, both the ones that accommodate culturally
and the ones that do not accommodate
culturally. If you have a video recorder, make a video of
the interaction you observe and, in your report, indicate the
scenes in terms of minutes/seconds (' ") on your video
playback machine. For example, you could write:
"(12' 45")
Luigi gave Tom a chip [patatina fritta],
touching it, and Tom looked horrified and refused it. I
think this indicates a fear of "germs" and a refusal of
a (for me) "natural" way of handling food (i.e., with
one's hands). Thus, for my cultural dimension ACCEPT
NATURE or CONTROL NATURE, I put Tom
close to CONTROL NATURE.
ACCEPT
NATURE me Luigi Tom CONTROL
NATURE
5.
Then write your observations down on two sheets of paper and give
it to your Group Leader for evaluation before November 3rd.
For the CRITERIA USED TO EVALUATE YOUR ESSAY,
click below.
Your
essay should clarify whether, in interacting with Americans, it
is better to : 1. be your Italian self and to take a neutral
stance, or 2. internalize American values and accommodate to
your interlocutors.
In
other words, your essay should contribute to answering the
question: "Does practising a neutral stance or
accommodation help you or hinder you in establishing
effective cross-cultural understanding with English-speaking
interlocutors from the United States?"
Your
essay should draw its conclusions form the empirical data you
(and the Official Observer) collect this week by visiting
American "lairs" in Rome. After your interaction with
the American speakers of English, you should therefore compare
your observations with those of the Official Observer (who may
also have video recorded the interaction) and a member of your
group who chose the opposite interactional style from yours.
Form
for the Group Leader to fill out by November 3rd>
![](../../../image/pallin.gif) Note:
One of the criteria used is whether your paper is "clear
and convincing" in its argumentation. What does this mean
in the case of this Task? For the answer, read below.
Your
paper must present clearly and convincingly (1.)
the conclusions you arrived at after your experimentation, (2.)
the premises you used as the basis for your investigation, (3.)
the empirical data you collected and the way you collected it,
(4.) the inductive reasoning you used to draw your conclusions
from your data and then, once again, the formulation of your
conclusions.
Note: "Premises" are the principles
that justify your investigative procedure; but they are
principles that you do not demonstrate to be valid -- you simply
accept them in order to conduct your experimentation. In
fact, in any scientific research, the researcher does not attempt
to demonstrate everything -- because his task would never end --
but only a particular issue. He does, however, explain the
principles he uses (that is, he does specify his premises and say
where he got them). This is what you must do at the
beginning of your report.
In your case you may say that
you have chosen to describe your interlocutor's culture on the
basis of (for example) Hofstede's 5 cultural dimensions.
Hofstede's dimensions are your premises. You do not have to
demonstrate that they really explain a person's culture: Hofstede
says so, and you accept his affirmation as the premise for your
investigation.
To be really convincing, you might choose
to invent a series of cultural dimensions that are better than
Hofstede's, Trompenaar's, Hall's, Laurent's or the other
intercultural scholars we have discussed. In this case, you
would have material for two essays. One would justify your
choice of parameters. The other would apply those
parameters in an investigation of American students' behavior.
You do not have time for the first essay and so therefore just do
the second one.
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