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).

To return, click here> 

 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>
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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