CROSS‐CULTURAL TESTING: AN ASPECT OF THE RESISTANCE REACTION

Abstract

This paper is based on a classroom experience that showed the need of teaching American culture before attempting to teach American literature meaningfully to foreigners. The students in this learning situation were the Middle‐Eastern employees of an American organization in the school year 1966–1967. The teachers found out the students interpreted literature in terms of their own native culture. Many times, a behavioral pattern had opposite meanings in American and Middle Eastern cultures. Consequently, a course in American culture was taught. In objective quizzes, whenever the questions on American behavioral patterns came directly from the book and were of a general nature, the students did well. But when the questions related to everyday‐life situations, the students unconsciously answered according to their own native behavioral patterns. Such answers revealed intense, vehement resistance to the target culture, due to prejudice and mistrust of the foreign behavioral codes. The students’ work careers depended on their school records. The answers to quiz questions were reliable. Gradually, the students responses showed less resistance to the target, cultural patterns of behavior.