Intercultural Dialogue in Practice

Managing Value Judgment through Foreign Language Education

By Stephanie Ann Houghton

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Stephanie Ann Houghton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-725-7

Contents

Figures and Tables,
Series Editors’ Preface,
Preface,
Introduction,
Part 1: Exploring the Roots of Value Judgment,
1 Information Processing, Socialisation and the Self,
2 Ethnocentrism and Ethnorelativism,
3 Theoretical and Political Perspectives upon Value Judgment,
Part 2: Managing Value Judgment in Foreign Language Education,
4 Overview of the Study,
5 The Intercultural Dialogue Model,
6 Critically Analysing Self and Other,
7 Critically Evaluating Self and Other,
8 Shifting the Interface: From Self and Other to Self and Society,
Conclusion,
Epilogue,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Information Processing, Socialisation and the Self

The Mind as an Information Handling System

The mind can be seen as an information handling system (de Bono, 1969, 1990, 1991) whose effectiveness derives from its ability to create, store, recognise and retrieve patterns of information. The memory surface of the nerve cells of the brain provides a special, yet essentially passive, environment in which information self-organises as it impacts upon the memory surface, forming channels that guide incoming information into deepening patterns that are influenced by the sequence of arrival and the nature of the surface. Parts of the environment can be attended to selectively, but since attention span is limited, only part of the memory surface can be activated at any one time, which is affected by what is being presented to the surface at the moment and what has happened to the surface in the past.

The most easily activated areas or patterns on the memory surface are the ones that have been encountered most often because they have left the strongest trace on the memory surface, giving rise to pattern repetition or reconstruction because such patterns are recalled more readily than others. Patterns engrained in memory tend to become increasingly rigid and can be difficult to change. Since the sequence of arrival of information determines its arrangement, the information could always be arranged better. Bias is built into the mind as anything resembling a standard pattern tends to be perceived as the standard pattern as information is processed, which centres the information enabling established patterns to string together into longer sequences that may become so dominant that they start to constitute their own patterns.

As information continues to impact upon the brain, the mind builds up a stock of pre-set patterns of information held in memory that facilitate communication through which information is transmitted through codes that refer people back to these pre-set patterns. Words or partial information can be communicated to trigger the retrieval of interlinked information patterns, which means that not all the information needs to be communicated to retrieve the pattern. Word triggers facilitate the transfer of information, rendering appropriate reaction to situations possible as situations are identified from initial aspects of them. Communication through language code thus depends upon the building up of a catalogue of retrievable patterns in memory.

Words can be loaded insofar as the value of the word is not expressed through a separate adjective, but contained within the word itself, and people may use adjectives freely to pass judgment without justification. Words can trigger emotional backgrounds that are unjustified and tend to reflect crude either/or dichotomies imbued with the sense of good and bad, or right and wrong. Such dichotomies, set up through the use of the word not, are based upon mutually exclusive categories that can easily contradict each other facilitating the sorting of information into one category or the other, imposing a false rigidity upon perception in the process.

This description of the mind as an information handling system summarised from the work of de Bono (1969, 1990, 1991) helps us to imagine information about the world being stored in data structures that store concepts in memory in multiple locations throughout the brain in schematic networks (Rumelhart, 1980; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986). In intercultural interaction, schemata provide a repertoire of frameworks regarding social beliefs, cultural values, expectations and assumptions that the person can use to make sense of the intercultural events and relationships (Endicott et al., 2003). Culture learning itself can be conceptualised as the internalisation of information held in schemata that store concepts through which individuals classify and interpret their experience of the world, and culture learning is influenced by language since it involves concept acquisition (Byram, 1989a).

Within interlinked schematic networks of information, words cohere in layered hierarchies with other words sharing many of the same semantic features. Super-ordinate concepts, such as living things, may come at the top of a hierarchy above multiple layers of subordinate concepts that may each contain separate, but hierarchically linked, categories with hierarchies meshing into hetararchies, and each language–culture establishing its own hetararchy (Fantini, 1995). Much human thought involves the categorisation of new objects and events, but while categorisation processes themselves are universal, the way hierarchies and categories are set up is not. This depends upon the amount and type of information people have at their disposal and considerable variation in conceptual thought exists (Rosch, 1978).

Network and hierarchy are two of the dominant images often used to conceptualise the structures in which information is contained in the mind. While the two images are not incompatible, and are often used interchangeably, the most useful image for the purpose of this book is that of concepts being contained in hierarchies rather than networks, not only because it accords with Rokeach’s description of the structure of value systems presented below, but also because the concept of hierarchy with discrete and separate elements that are evaluated and ranked relative to each other lends itself well to the structuring of teaching activities that require critical analysis and evaluation, as we shall see.

According to Rokeach (1973), values manifest themselves in everyday life as enduring beliefs that specific modes of behaviour or end-states of existence are preferable to others, that act as guiding standards for action, attitudes, ideology, self-presentation, evaluations, judgments, justifications and comparison between self and others. Highlighting the hierarchical structure of value systems, Rokeach notes that since any given situation will typically activate several values within that system rather than just a single one, and different subsets of the value system will be activated in different situations, a relative dimension comes into play when values come into competition, are prioritised and integrated into relatively stable hierarchically organised systems, wherein each value is ordered in priority or importance relative to other values.

The underlying structural similarities between the descriptions of value systems and conceptual hetararchies presented above are obvious. Further, while concept and value systems have a measure of stability, they are also dynamically under construction as new concepts and values are integrated into the existing system in order to stabilise it. What the description of the value system adds to the description of the conceptual system, then, is the relative ranking of elements through evaluation. Later in the book, we will see how people can actively adjust their concepts and values to those of others by applying selected evaluative standards.

This book is primarily concerned with how value judgment should be managed in foreign language education, and how language helps to shape thought insofar as it structures the way in which people view the world (Hunt & Agnoli, 1991; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lantolf, 1999; Wierzbicka, 1997). Worldview is, to some extent, mediated by language and its conceptual structures and components (Fantini, 1995), and insofar as words focus attention upon particular aspects of environmental phenomena and affect their interpretation (Lantolf, 1999), they set up points during information processing at which the world is translated into the symbols and then translated back into the real world. It is at these translation points that language runs into the variability of perception and the interactive complexity of the world (de Bono, 1991).

Any links that can be found between language and thought are not, however, necessarily representative of ‘incommensurate world views, or of concepts that are nameless and therefore unimaginable, or of dissecting nature along lines laid down by our native languages according to terms that are absolutely obligatory’ (Pinker, 1994: 66), and the claim that language controls thought remains controversial (Hardin & Banaji, 1993). But the linguistically structured conceptual frameworks people use to categorise the world around them contain both cultural and personal models (Lantolf, 1999). The former are sets of conventionally constructed concepts constituting the shared cognitive resources of a community, constraining what people attend to and perceive as salient in the world. The latter are unique sets of concepts, based on life experience, that are heavily influenced by, but not totally determined by, cultural models. People generally tend to be unaware of how far their personal models are influenced by cultural models and cannot make them explicit.

Mental representations can be represented in the brain without being couched in words and reasoning, and the deduction of new pieces of knowledge from old ones takes place in sub-language systems. Representations can be considered physical objects whose parts and arrangement correspond, piece for piece, to some ideas or facts that can be symbolised consistently and processed, according to principles of logic, that can result in the alteration of the representations or the creation of new representations as pieces of the representations are copied (Pinker, 1994).

This view of mental representations as being discrete and separate elements that can be rearranged and expanded upon in the mind accords with the image presented earlier of value-laden conceptual hierarchies that are always under construction, as new concepts and values are processed and integrated into the existing system. Such basic universal cognitive processes also involve the deployment of reasoning and logic during decision-making. For example, everyone has the capability for self and other evaluation on the basis of available facts and arguments (Byram & Guilherme, 2000).

But the English language in particular does not embody the information that a processor would need to perform valid sequences of reasoning due to its ambiguity, lack of logical explicitness and synonymy, and to get languages of thought to serve reasoning properly would require them to look more like each other than their spoken counterparts. While the language of thought that best supports reasoning, or mentalese, is probably universal, the underlying human capacity for reasoning and logic is clouded by both language itself and communicative difficulty (Pinker, 1994).

This echoes de Bono’s (1991) view that while language is a good describing system, it is not a good perceiving or thinking system because definitions depend on other definitions, frames of reference and context. Problems can arise when the words are too big and clumsy, or when we do not have words at all. And words, especially adjectives, can trigger emotional backgrounds that are unjustified when people use them freely to pass judgment without justification.

The representations underlying thought and the sentences in a language can thus work at cross-purposes, and communicative efforts may fail to transmit the vast amounts of information that lie behind utterances, which are also hampered by limited attention spans. Since selective attention is limited, details can never be focused upon in equal measure, and the selection of some points over others renders any rendition of the truth necessarily partial. When fractions of messages are communicated, listeners fill in the gaps by drawing upon prior knowledge as they attempt to grasp the meaning of utterances.

Perceptual processing, parsing and utilisation are three distinct information processing stages of language comprehension (Anderson, 1985). The first stage of perceptual processing involves the selective direction of attention onto sections of aural or written input for a few seconds, during which time preliminary analysis may convert them into meaningful representations (Call, 1985). The second stage of parsing involves the construction of further meaningful representations of input by segmenting sentences into language chunks, the size and composition of which depend on the presentation of the information and the person’s general knowledge of the language (O’Malley & Chamot, 1989, 1990; Richards, 1983). The third stage of utilisation involves the decoding of chunks by matching them with meaning-based representations held in long-term memory. Meanings are then concatenated with other parsed chunks, to form a more complete understanding of the input as ideas are linked. When single concepts are evoked, connections are made with other concepts through spreading activation within conceptual frameworks.

Prior knowledge held in value-laden conceptual hierarchies assists language comprehension through top-down processing as people interpret new information in the light of old, inferring and predicting meaning when there are gaps in understanding. Alternatively, the starting point for comprehension may be the analysis of individual words to form meanings that accumulate, but lack of attention to context and first language interference make bottom-up processing inefficient (O’Malley & Chamot, 1989, 1990). Both types of processing may be misleading if prior knowledge is drawn upon inappropriately (Carrell, 1983).

Cognitive Development

In the field of developmental psychology, the development of understanding is considered to be a social process that comprises a series of qualitatively different stages of acquisition of conceptual frameworks, ‘in which more adaptive and flexible processing systems come to replace less flexible, more concrete ones’ (Sercu, 2000: 64). For this reason, intercultural development is often discussed in relation to cognitive and moral development (Byram, 1989a; Doyé, 1992, 2003; Endicott et al., 2003; Sercu, 2000), in all of which a central issue is the way people respond to discrepancies between incoming information and the information already held in their mind.

Cognitive theorists propose that people are motivated to adjust their mental representations of the world to reduce cognitive discrepancies, accommodate new information and create realistic mental maps of the world. People are driven to maintain cognitive consistency because the awareness that two cognitions are dissonant (or that the attitudes are incompatible with behaviour) is so unpleasant that they attempt to reduce the discrepancy (Festinger, 1957). Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance and Piaget’s concept of disequilibrium both rest upon the view that people tend to attempt to resolve cognitive conflict when there is a discrepancy between two beliefs, two actions, or between a belief and an action (Crain, 2000).

Piaget suggested that during information processing, new information about the world can either be assimilated into existing conceptual frameworks, or the frameworks themselves may be modified to accommodate inconsistent information. The continuous processes of assimilation and accommodation can produce both adaptive change and disequilibration, both of which can trigger various readjustment mechanisms (such as selection, categorisation and combination) as individuals strive to resolve cognitive conflict. Piaget conceptualised development in terms of the assimilation of external perturbations by the internal structures of the mind, which stimulate evolution and/or innovation in the process. And contradiction works as an active force that can help consolidate and improve the system as equilibration is sought between internal conceptual frameworks and external objects, between conceptual frameworks themselves, and between individual conceptual frameworks and their larger structures (Gruber & Voneche, 1995). An overview of the general stages of development in Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory is presented in Table 1.1.

Notably, when people process information about the world, they can either attempt to maintain existing impressions or to develop more accurate representations, operating either under an impression–maintenance or an accuracy mode. In the former, simplified processing strategies are adopted to maintain simple, but coherent, impressions by ignoring or distorting inconsistent information that threatens existing conceptual categories, especially when cognitive resources are scarce and/or when motivation is low. But when cognitive resources are more plentiful, motivation is higher and when people are sufficiently familiar with a target and are presented with novel and otherwise atypical information, more systematic processing strategies may be adopted that lead to the re-categorisation of information or the modification of existing conceptual frameworks. For this to occur, motivation and cognitive resources are crucial; ‘people have to be willing to get involved in active information processing’ (Sercu, 2000: 67).

(Continues…)Excerpted from Intercultural Dialogue in Practice by Stephanie Ann Houghton. Copyright © 2012 Stephanie Ann Houghton. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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