Julie-- thanks for bringing the culture issue up-- and thanks to MIssy for her wise comments and great insight into helping learners figure out what they want to learn and how.? 

AS you all know, I love to give examples. Look at this quote from a woman from Burundi-- 20 years old-- a student in a GED class in Texas:? 
" You GED teachers are so stupid!!? You do not even know what you want us to learn.? In our country, a teacher tells us exactly what to learn, we go home and learn it. Then we know we will have? a test on that.? Here you tell us to go home and study something but we do not know what the test will be about."?? 

This young lady was totally furious and erupted at her teacher because all her cultural conditioning for learning was being ignored.? She was ready to memorize--and was not being asked to do that.? I often point out that if your whole approach to learning is to memorize, when a teacher or tutor asks you to go home and "review" something' or "look it over"-- the students do not "hear" "learn"---and they know pretty quickly that the teacher will not ask for the material in memorized form, so they do nothing.? 

I asked my college students about homework.? They often had a sort of cavalier approach to homework as well despite WRITTEN information on the course info sheet that homework counted in their grades. Students from several different cultures reported that since only the exam at the end of the year counted in their country,? homework was done only by the overachievers......it was given, but not graded, said some-- not given at all, said others.?? No amount of poor grades or talking about it convinced them deeply enough to hand in all homework.? Only until one or two semesters of lower grades than anticipated did they begin to compute that homework did indeed COUNT in the grade average!!? 

There are MANY examples of cultural differences in the way adults approach learning and teaching.? I always urge teachers to find out about their learners' beliefs about learning and teaching-- who is considered responsible for what and how.?? You will be surprised at how much power they give you when you, considering that they are adults, are expecting them to have more involvement in the process.?? 

This is not true for all groups of course--- persons from eastern Europe tend to be openly critical of teachers ( one teacher I worked with said her students from one eastern European country give her a "report card" every day-- at the end of the class, they tell her if the lesson was good or not, if they liked the topic, if she taught well or not.?? Imagine how intimidating THAT is!!? Contrast that with the learner from Asia I consulted with recently who never objected when his tutor kept doing the alphabet and colors --and he was fully fluent and mostly literate and wanted to improve his conversational skills.? 

So yes, culture is a huge factor in how ELLs respond to and interact with the classroom they find themselves in.? 

For more on this, see references in my article.???? Robin?? 




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