Blog Post #2

Blog Post #2--Lieb, M. (2019). Culture Distance and Cultural Dimensions in Diverse ELT Environments: A Quantitative Investigation. (under review) Handout provided in class

Reading the section on how the cultures differ, it briefly mentioned how Japanese culture is low context but American/Western culture is high context. I think that this is an important thing to mention as we have talked about it quite a lot in the last ESLG class that I took.

Our conversation revolved primarily around citing, as people who do live in low context cultures often value the group's goal rather than honoring the individual so a Japanese person would be more likely to plagiarize in our view of plagiarism. However, Americans value the individual and being recognized for being the best, rather than working cooperatively, and so the consequences of plagiarism, beginning in even elementary school, are immense. 

However, the low-context to high-context ideas also follow just in plain writing, whether or not it is a research paper. While I'm currently in a class where we spend an hour at least every class talking about structure, clarity, and focusing, in an effort to make our writing legible and clear to anyone who reads it, other cultures would have a vague thesis-y paragraph in which the reader must do the work to accomplish figuring out what the paper is attempting to argue. 

This is why an American teacher teaching English to a Japanese student would struggle with the connection of either culture--the values are far different. From birth, the US advocates for competition while Japanese culture advocates obedience and teamwork; a high school student would have a hard time accepting this entirely different motive of learning.