Culture and Learning: Reconstructing Research on Learning for Students in Asia and the Pacific (original) (raw)
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How students learn in East Asian cultures and how that learning may evolve in the future
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This workshop focuses on how East Asian cultures furnish unique contexts for education and learning in the region. We share and discuss ongoing research, observations, and theory buildings with regard to the interdisciplinary research on the learning sciences, with the unique context of the interplay of sociocultural, language, and political and historical factors in East Asia. The guiding question is: How learning experiences are shaped by the cultural contexts? In elaborating the uniqueness of the Eastern Asian cultural context, existing studies show that the cultural beliefs, the native languages and bilingual contexts, virtual adolescent social lives, have impacts on the teaching and learning. These studies and the observations of those impacts initiate the introduction to the general theoretical synthesis of Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) theory. This half day workshop aims at reaching a consensus on the benefits of exploring wisdom from East Asian cultures in transforming learn...
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This entry looks at the diverse range of contexts where English is taught and learned in South-East Asia, from outer circle countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore, to expanding circle countries such as Thailand and Laos. The entry considers the stereotypes attached to the teaching and learning of English in Asian culture, then considers whether a) these stereotypes are in fact true given the diversity of learning styles that may be apparent within any one context, and b) how to overcome such stereotypes through a system of changes to curriculum, assessment and pedagogy that promotes inclusivity for all learners, on the one hand, and celebrates the diversity of learning styles and cultures present in the region, on the other
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Intercultural Communication in Asia: Education, Language and Values, 2018
The adoption of English as the working language of Asia and the ASEAN region, together with an increase in the mobility of people and information, are creating new and significant pressures on language and culture education in English, as well as other languages, in the region. It is also bringing about an enormously expanded use of English between speakers for whom English is not a first language, and this expansion includes communication in English between people of different cultural backgrounds. The surge in the use of English highlights a number of current challenges. English language proficiency levels vary widely across Asia. Communicative competence in English as a second language is at least equally problematic. The matter is further complicated by the growth of the Internet and other technological progress, which has resulted in the creation of a self-managing, often Do-it-Yourself society engaged in "just-in-time" rather than "just-in-case" activity, as in the past. These considerations call for new learning/teaching approaches which go beyond the conventional classroom and curriculum. The present chapter proposes a generic framework for implementing (language-)learning/ teaching structures, with a special focus on challenging learners' "operational histories"-their habitual patterns of understanding stimuli from their experience of the world. The framework is explicitly learner-centred, individual, personalized and adaptive, and is designed to help learners develop mindsets and strategies to tackle learning issues on their own initiative and in their own way. An example is presented of a successful implementation of the framework for the learning of English pronunciation by Chinese university English Majors. This kind of approach, building specifically on challenging learners' "operational histories", has significant potential for developing language and culture teaching and learning, and the acquisition of intercultural communication competence, in Asian contexts.