script for Unit Classroom CUnit Four Listening Task Classroom Communication When you are asked to picture a classroom in your minds eye, what do you see? You probably see a classroom that is familiar to you and that would be familiar to students from your culture, However, not everyone will see the same picture in their minds. Although many people have similar images of what a classroom looks like in their minds eye, their culture greatly influences the way they view the teacher-student environment, and culture also influences how a person understands the ways in which information is taught and learned in the classroom. Culture also plays an important role in determining how teachers and students communicate in the classroom. In this lecture, Ill give you a few examples of some of the ways that culture affects this communication. The classroom as we know it,. by the way, is a relatively recent innovation, according to Janis Andersen and Robert Powell. Great teachers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Confucius taught without the benefit of a blackboard, chalk, desks, and the standard comforts (or discomforts) of a classroom building. But let me return to the main topic of this lecture the influence of culture on behavior and communication between teacher and students in the classroom. If you have come from another culture to study in North America, you may already have noticed that teachers and students in American universities interact and communicate in the classroom in ways that differ from how teachers and students communicate in your home culture. its culture that influences and establishes these interactions and communication patterns. Of course, culture is a term that is used in many different ways. Basically, culture provides us with a system of knowledge that.-allows us to communicate with others and teaches us how to interpret their verbal and nonverbal behavior. Culture influences and establishes how people interact with one another (or do not interact with one another). In particular, culture influences the rituals that take place in the classroom setting, and it influences the ways students participate in the classroom discourse, it also influences the esteem in which teachers are held. Rituals are systematic procedures used to performs/certain act or to communicate a certain message. In some countries, when a teacher enters the classroom, the students ritually stand up. In the United States, a classroom ritual occurs when a student raises her hand to signal to the teacher that she knows the answer to a question. This is not a universal classroom ritual to signal intent to answer a question, however. Jamaican students snap or flap their fingers to signal that they want to answer a question that has been posed, s In some college and graduate-level seminars in North American universities, students do not make any physical signs when they want to speak; they state their ideas whenever they feel the urge or when they feel it is appropriate. This sort of classroom behavior is especially confusing to students from cultures in which there are no rituals for attracting the teachers attention because the student is not expected to participate in the class at all. This brings us to the issue of classroom participation. North American students of European origin are usually more talkative in class and more willing to share .their opinions than students of native American heritage or from Asian backgrounds. This brings us to the issue of classroom participation. This difference is directly related to cultural values about learning and education, and classroom behavior. Euro-American students culture teaches them that learning is shaped and helped by their talk and active participation in exploring or discussing issues. Asian students, however, are generally taught that they will learn best by listening to and absorbing the knowledge being given to them by the teacher. In their article Culture and Classroom Communication, Janis Andersen and Robert Powell point out that some cultures do not have a way for students to signal a desire to talk to a teacher: in these cultures, students, speak out only after the teacher has spoken to them. Most classroom interaction in Vietnam is tightly controlled by the teacher, according to Andersen and Powell. The esteem in which teachers are held also varies culturally. The Vietnamese have a great deal of respect for their instructors and consider them to be honored members of society, according to researchers Samovar and Porter. They see instructors as symbols of learning and culture. In Germany, students value the personal opinions of their instructors, and it is not customary to disagree with or contradict teachers. Israeli students, on the other hand, can criticize an instructor if they feel that he or she is wrong about some is sue or information, according to Samovar and Porter. There are