Multicultural Reading Research Articles

Culture and EFL Instruction: How do Eight Graders Perceive Multicultural Reading Activities in their EFL Classrooms?

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the study of cultural integration in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms. The incorporation of local culture into the EFL classroom plays a crucial role in increasing students' awareness of culture and identity maintenance. However, studies on the development of multicultural reading materials have, to the best of our knowledge, been conducted infrequently in Indonesia. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to find out students' perceptions of multicultural reading materials that we had previously developed. This is a survey-based study involving eighth-grade students in an Indonesian junior high school in Lampung. Using descriptive statistics, the collected data were analysed. The findings indicate that the participants in the study favour the implementation of the multicultural reading activities we developed. The tasks have a favourable impact on their reading skills. The implications of the findings are also examined, along with a number of suggestions for future research.

‘Unsilencing’ Chinese Indonesians through Children's Literature

This study investigates children's books published after the collapse in 1998 of an authoritarian regime in Indonesia that spanned more than three decades. During these years, Indonesians with Chinese ancestry were silenced from expressing their culture, tradition, and language in public. A dichotomy between Chinese Indonesians and the ‘indigenous’ Indonesians was also employed as a political strategy that resulted in negative stereotypes of the ethnic group that persist long after the regime's demise. As the current post-authoritarian government attempts to reinstate Chinese Indonesians’ rights in observing their culture, children's literature in the country is also embracing this ethnic group. This article employs a critical multicultural reading to examine the representation of Chinese Indonesians across a range of picturebooks and middle-grade novels.

Effects of unfamiliar diverse names on elementary students' passage comprehension.

Elementary school multicultural reading curricula include characters with diverse proper names, which are often unfamiliar and differ phonetically from students' native language. These names could impact reading outcomes by increasing students' cognitive load and/or creating cognitive disfluency. In Study 1, students in grades 1 through 2 read a standard passage including common names and a matched passage including unfamiliar names of Russian origin. A paired samples t test indicated unfamiliar diverse names in grade-level passages significantly reduced students' reading comprehension. Study 2 was designed to determine if preteaching diverse names would mitigate their adverse effects on reading comprehension. Results indicated second-grade students who received preteaching comprehended significantly more of the passage than those who did not receive preteaching. Discussion focuses on the need for research clarifying the relationship between multicultural learning materials and academic outcomes and validating efficient methods for familiarizing students with difficult, phonetically unfamiliar words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Designing Cross-Cultural Collaborative Online Learning Framework for Online Instructors

Online education has now become an integral part of the educational landscape in the United States and around the world, where it serves as the primary source of enrollment growth in higher education. The rising student population in online learning mandates instructors and instructional designers to be aware of the importance of cultural factors that influence students’ learning experiences and academic performance in the online environments. However, few empirical studies have examined instructors’ perspectives on instructional strategies that promote cross-cultural collaboration in online classrooms, specifically, instructional strategies that instructors use to promote educational success of diverse learners in online environments. Drawing on collaborative online learning theory, this study analyzed qualitative interview data and online activities of 40 online instructors from two universities. Results showed the following themes; (a) instructional strategies that facilitate cross-cultural collaborative online learning, (b) challenges of teaching diverse learners in online learning, and (c) designing cross-cultural collaborative online framework for instructors. Findings suggested that most instructors lacked the knowledge and skills in addressing the needs of diverse learners in the online learning environments regarding their ability to recognize students’ cultural differences and incorporate multicultural reading resources in course contents to meet the needs of diverse students. Thus, the need to design a framework will broaden instructors’ understanding and promote cross-cultural collaboration in online teaching to help meet the needs of diverse students in online learning environments.KEYWORDS: Cross-cultural collaborative learning, culturally diverse learners, collaborative learning activities, instructional strategies, Collaboration in online learning

Developing Multicultural Reading Materials for the Cultivation of Multicultural Literacy in Elementary School Korean Language Textbooks

Developing Multicultural Reading Materials for the Cultivation of Multicultural Literacy in Elementary School Korean Language Textbooks

Surviving the “School of Slavery”: Acculturation in Sharon Draper’s Copper Sun and Joyce Hansen’s The Captive

Although children’s literature has long alluded to cultural connections between Africans and African Americans, very few texts establish clear lines of influence between particular African ethnic groups and African American characters and communities. Joyce Hansen’s The Captive (1994) and Sharon Draper’s Copper Sun (2006) stand out in portraying protagonists Kofi’s and Amari’s reliance on their past upbringing as Ashanti and Ewe, respectively. As Kofi and Amari endure the traumas of the Middle Passage and slavery in eighteenth-century America, they adapt by relying on their past socialization in traditional West African societies. The two novels challenge the idea of cultural erasure promoted in Elizabeth Yates’ Amos Fortune, Free Man (1950), which is still a fixture on multicultural reading lists for middle school students. The Captive and Copper Sun do provide sharply contrasting visions of their protagonist’s relationships to American society. Copper Sun indicates that a black girl’s concerns, including her need for subsistence and protection, and her desire for creative expression and personal autonomy, can complement the economic and military interests of the state. By contrast, The Captive insists on the necessity for its emancipated protagonist to maintain an adversarial role within a stratified, white-dominated U.S. culture. The novels thus highlight the very different messages about social identity and participation that recent multicultural children’s literature can convey.

Exploring family reading practices in non-Kuwaiti nannies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how home reading practices can impact what teachers assume to be the optimum practice in preparing students for school may not be supported by the local culture. In Kuwait, I have heard teachers repeatedly complain that students do not read at home or seem to value reading. Kuwaiti adults relate that they rarely engage in reading for pleasure. Students here are challenged with learning English, but also seem to take a greater amount of time to understand the use of reading in their lives and learning. These factors led me to consider that what teachers assume to be the optimum practice in preparing students for school may not be supported by the local culture. Design/methodology/approach – In this case study, five nannies were interviewed focusing on participants’ reading practices in their homes of origin and those practiced with Kuwaiti children. Observational notes were taken to record nonverbal communication. Data were analyzed to uncover references to home reading practices such as storytelling, recreational reading and verbal interaction based on the reading. References were color coded and a database was constructed of references the nannies made to reading practices both in their homes of origin and in the Kuwaiti homes in which they work. The references to reading practices were then categorized according to activities reported. Findings – As a result, it was found that the nannies perceived the purpose of reading to be for education only, storytelling is used for different purposes in different cultures, print material were rarely found in the homes of the nannies due to lack of economic means, and the fathers of most of the nannies were critical in their reading development. Research limitations/implications – Further exploration of the home reading practices of the Kuwaitis is needed to fully support the effective inclusion of their cultural reading traditions into school practice. Parent and student surveys, parent interviews and possibly home visits would assist researchers in more fully defining home reading practices. Partnering with Arabic-speaking or Kuwaiti teachers would benefit researchers in being able to efficiently translate for the interviews and then discuss their observations, giving the researchers a more nuanced perspective of the findings. Originality/value – This paper offers an original view on a particular aspect of international education, namely, reading habits, and discusses the promotion of multicultural reading instruction in a more culturally responsive manner.

Professional Identity Construction Issues in Becoming an English Teacher

Teachers’ professional identity construction (TPI) is how teachers define their professional roles and integrate them with personal roles while becoming and being a teacher. TPI is influenced by various factors and conditions both inside and outside the classroom. The present paper reports a study of TPI in relation to prospective English teachers currently learning English at Iranian tertiary level of education. The study attempted to summarize the main findings of recent studies of teachers’ professional identity. These findings were classified under three categories: a) the construction of TPI, b) the characteristics of TPI, and c) practicing teachers’ narration of TPI., the major factors affecting TPI were also summarized in four categories, based on the related literature: 1) historical factors, 2) sociological factors, 3) psychological factors, and 4) cultural factors related to perceptions and notions of professional community. Informed by these ideas, the study presents findings of a survey of TPI issues reported by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student teachers. 47 randomly selected student teachers in their senior undergraduate or graduate studies in EFL in a major university in central Iran responded to a five-point, Likert-scale, researcher-made questionnaire on TPI. The initial analyses of their responses, strengthened by follow-up focus-group interviews with eight of these participants, revealed that student teachers expected more support given from the authorities, sought for more cultural knowledge of English-speaking countries, expected a lax attitude toward the use of the Internet, audio-visual materials, and multicultural reading and writing materials. They would like to be equipped with more communicative teaching techniques and more power to develop up-to-date materials. This study have some implications for teacher education programs in Iran.

Repugnant Aboriginality: LeAnne Howe's Shell Shaker and Indigenous Representation in the Age of Multiculturalism

Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe's 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of Indian savagery. Yet these depictions of the repugnant, that is, of ancient practices now prohibited by law or found reprehensible by a public sense of ethics, allow Howe to escape the integrative thrust of contemporary multiculturalism by preempting identification through difference—an interpretive logic according to which we are all the same because we are all different—at the center of contemporary multicultural reading practices. As the readers of Howe's novel recoil at the repugnant, they experience a limit to their understanding of the indigenous Other, a goal ethnic writing is presumed to facilitate. Howe's novel is a plea for alternative ways of apprehending difference in contemporary North America, whether we attempt it through reading literature or through other private or public activities. By redefining the interpretive ground of contemporary reading practices, Shell Shaker clears space for the potential welcoming of the (indigenous) Other despite freshly experienced limits of understanding, a welcoming that is not predicated on exacting transparency in exchange for acknowledgment. Further, the novel prompts an acknowledgment of contemporary indigenous nations, and the contemporary versions of indigenous traditionalism in particular, as viable forms of governance and sociality, forms that already successfully constitute political reality in North America.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Changing Significance of Race: African Americans and the Hebrew Bible

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Changing Significance of Race: African Americans and the Hebrew Bible

Mystieke dynamiek op de top van de extase

During the Golden Age, Spain has only begun to assimilate Nordic and Peninsular (Christian and non Christian) traditions. In this context the importance of the converses or 'converts', especially those of Islamic background after eight centuries of coexistence, cannot be underestimated in important spiritual renewals. Mystical dynamics in the summit of ecstasy: Ruusbroec's 'superessence of the soul', San Juan de la Cruz's 'corazon', and Ibn 'Arabi's 'qalb' compares three concepts in three mystical traditions frequently held separate: the Nordic tradition of Ruusbroec, the Spanish of John of the Cross, and the sufi of Ibn 'Arabī. The symbol of the heart serves Luce Lopez-Baralt as a starting point for thematic comparison between the Dutch Medieval, the Classical Spanish, and Sufi mysticism. She analyzes how each tradition uses other aspects of the complex symbolism of the heart, emphasizing a multi-cultural reading of mystical images.

Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication and Canada

Grandmother Andre told stories in front of a campfire. Elizabeth Goudie wrote a memoir in school scribblers. Phyllis Knight taped hours of interviews with her son. Today's families rely on television and video cameras. They are all making history. In a different approach to that old issue, 'the Canadian identity,' Gerald Friesen links the media studies of Harold Innis to the social history of recent decades. The result is a framework for Canadian history as told by ordinary people. Friesen suggests that the common peoples' perceptions of time and space in what is now Canada changed with innovations in the dominant means of communication. He defines four communication-based epochs in Canadian history: the oral-traditional world of pre-contact Aboriginal people; the textual-settler household of immigrants; the print-capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the screen-capitalism that has emerged in the last few decades. This analysis of communication is linked to distinctive political economies, each of which incorporates its predecessors in an increasingly complex social order. In each epoch, using the new communication technologies, people struggled to find the political means by which they could ensure that they and their households survived and, if they were lucky, prospered. Canada is the sum of their endeavours. .Citizens and Nation. demonstrates that it is possible to find meaning in the nation's past that will interest, among others, a new, young, and multicultural reading audience.

Reading Multiculturalism in the United States and Canada: The Anthological vs the Cognitive

This article examines the differing meanings of multiculturalism in the United States and Canada, and how this difference affects multicultural readings of literary works that have implications for national identity. Although I argue that Canada has a longer tradition of multicultural reading than the United States, and that what the United States' academy is today calling multiculturalism may not be multiculturalism at all, it is not correct to read this paper as favouring one nation (or the reading practices of one nation) over the other. This argument is not an American or Canadian nationalist argument; rather, it is a North American comparatist one. It operates in a framework where American Studies is, as John Carlos Rowe puts it, `a comparatist discipline that will respect the many different social systems and cultural affiliations of the ``Americas" '; in this case, especially `how the many different Americas and Canada have historically influenced and interpreted each other' (Rowe, 13–14). Plural nations constantly face the foundational problem of whether they should persist as unified entities, or resolve themselves into their separate — and sometimes oppositional — constituent parts. This is something that American nations have in common; indeed, it is a fact that is constitutive of the very idea of `America.' To study it comparatively is not to advance the cause of national competition, but of international understanding. As Walter Benn Michaels explains in Our America, the problem for the United States is what to do when `confronted with the imminent possibility of dissolution: What makes the nation one nation? What makes Americans Americans?' (15). The same problem exists in Canada, a nation notorious for its ongoing drama of imminent dissolution.

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Taking Children’s Literature Seriously: Reading for Pleasure and Social Change

Investigates how multiple stances in reading can reveal new insights into texts. Demonstrates three ways that a single text can be read from the perspectives of a pleasurable reading, a postcolonial reading, and a critical multicultural reading. Argues that readers will confirm existing meanings determined by others’ ideologies unless they are able to read for social change and justice.