Month: July 2021

Refection of Intervention 4

My intervention 4 was designed to help people build their self-awareness by understanding their own cultural. In this intervention, I asked 6 people if they have a meaningful object in their family which was passed down from elders and then explain the story behind it. However, two of these participants said they do not have something like that in their family and other four participants provided their meaningful objects.

Though the participants are from China, they are from different part of China and have different local culture. The meaningful objects from those four participants are different and all of them can represent Chinese culture. From their feedback, they gained more awareness of their family culture when they tried to get the information and story behind the objects.

From this intervention, I got the idea of developing people’s self-awareness but there are some limitations of this intervention. First, not everyone has or likes to talk about the meaningful objects in their family. This should be considered in my future research. In addition, I need to find more people from different country and with different background so that I can get more result with less bias.

Plan of August

Based on the feedback from my tutor today, I make this plan to develop my project in August.

  1. Ask more people from different countries to participate in Intervention 4.
  2. Write a reflection of Intervention 4.
  3. Find more people who are living abroad and ask their experiences in a foreign country, what level of their culture competence, if they can share their way to develop culture competence.
  4. Get contact with professionals who have done similar work about culture .

Intervention 4

Can people enhance self-awareness by understanding their family culture?

Intervention 4

I asked 7 people to tell me if they have a meaningful object in their family such as family heritage. And then explain more about the history behind it. 3 of them said they don’t have something like that in their family. 

Participator 1:

A Chinese Tea Set

These are wedding gift of her parents and this tea set are from a long-established tea enterprise in Beijing named Zhang Yi Yuan. She said the tea set is not that valuable, but it is meaningful because that tea enterprise had a history of more than 100 years.

Participator 2:

12 Gold Chinese Zodiac Accessories (only photos of 10)

Her mother bought one gold zodiac accessory each year and it took 12 years to gather all of them, so they are very meaningful to her family.

Participator 3:

A Gold Bracelet（no photo)

It is a gold bracelet from her mother and it will be a part of her dowry in the future. This gold bracelet takes dragon and phoenix rejoicing design to show a meaning in extremely good fortune.

Participator 4:

Silver coins from the period of Republic of China

Example image

These coins has been passed down from his grandmother’s family for three generations. These coins represent the changing times and currency.

These four participators are my friends from China. All their meaningful objects can represent a part of Chinese culture. From their feedback, when they asked their parents or other family members about the information, they gained more awareness of their family culture. I can’t assess how much they have enhanced their self-awareness, but this intervention helped them to understand their own culture.  

As I’ve only got four participators, I’m planning to ask more people about this and prepare for next step of developing cultural competence.

New Research Question

My new question is ‘How can young people develop cultural competence when they are living abroad?’

Cultural competence is an important skill that can help people to develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural background. 

From the research, I found even people who are living abroad, they may not develop their cultural competence because they need to accept both cultures from their home country and host country.

And there are three ways to develop cultural competence which is have self-awareness, understand people’s worldview, and value and have intervention skills by building cross-cultural bridges.

Social scientists across many disciples cite gaining self-awareness as a first crucial step in developing cultural competence. 

I want to help people to build self-awareness regarding their own culture. 

So I created Intervention 4 to test if people can enhance self-awareness by understanding their family culture. 

References

DESAI, P.P., DODOR, B.A. and CARROLL, E.B., 2020. Exploring One’s Family Heritage to Enhance Self-awareness: A Step Toward Developing Cultural Competence. Family Relations, 69(1), pp. 76-91.

Extensionpublications.unl.edu. 2021. Cultural Competence: An Important Skill Set for the 21st Century. [online] Available at: <https://extensionpublications.unl.edu/assets/html/g1375/build/g1375.htm> [Accessed 23 July 2021].

Improving Cultural Competence. 2015. Rockville: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Kommers, S, & Bista, K (eds) 2020, Inequalities in Study Abroad and Student Mobility : Navigating Challenges and Future Directions, Taylor & Francis Group, Milton. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [26 July 2021].

Maddux, W. and Galinsky, A., 2009. Cultural borders and mental barriers: The relationship between living abroad and creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), pp.1047-1061.

Tadmor, C., Galinsky, A. and Maddux, W., 2012. Getting the most out of living abroad: Biculturalism and integrative complexity as key drivers of creative and professional success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(3), pp.520-542.Posted on 24th July 2021Categories InterventionsLeave a commenton Intervention 4Edit”Intervention 4″Accessibility StatementTheme accessibilityTerms and Conditions

Intervention 3

My previous two interventions focused on learning foreign languages and build people’s confidence. Then I developed my intervention 1 and 2 to design my intervention 3.

Secondary recourses:

Stephen Krashen on language acquisition

His theory of language learning is “We acquire language in one way and only one way: when we understand messages. We call this comprehensible input. We acquire language when we understand what people tell us. Comprehensible input has been the last resort of the language teaching profession. Picture, knowledge of the world, realia, etc., helps language acquisition.” 

Factors that relate to success in language acquisition:

  • Motivation
  • Self-esteem 
  • Anxiety 

People acquire language in one way, when they get comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment.

Intervention 3

Stakeholders: People who want to learn a new language.

Platform: Language lesson game

Intention: Encourage people to learn a language in a more efficient way and reduce anxiety.

Question supporting the intervention: How can people acquire new language?

Activity allowing users to engage:

Based on the theory of Stephen Krashen, I designed this intervention. I found two similar short Spanish sentences.

The first sentence only has the Spanish audio. It is: Ésta es mi casa. En ella hay una sala, una cocina y tres dormitories.

The second sentence has the Spanish audio and some drawing. It is: Ésta es mi habitación. En ella hay una mesa y dos sillas.

I played these two sentences two times to 5 non-Spanish speakers to test if they can remember some vocabularies.    

Feedback:

All of them cannot fully understand the first sentence and they cannot remember any vocabularies.

For the second sentence, everyone can understand its meaning by the image. All of them cannot remember all the vocabularies but they can recognise some of them.

The participators said it’s not easy to learn a new language by only listening few times but they find it can be a good way to learn new languages.

From this intervention, I showed the people that they can understand a new language without translating every word so that to reduce their anxiety of language learning.

Intervention 2

Intervention 2

  1. Stakeholders: People who need to boost confidence when communicating in another language.
  2. Medium: Acting and guessing game
  3. Intention: Prove the power of non-verbal communication
  4. Question supporting the intervention: Can people express their selves without using language? 
  5. Activity allowing users to engage: Playing acting and guessing game. One person acts something without speaking and another one guesses the meaning.
  6. Feedback: 
    1. It’s not easy to guess when actors don’t speak anything, but if actors can describe a little bit, it’s better.
    2. Feel more confident to speak with others even don’t have good language skills.

Secondary research

Non-verbal communication

This article focuses on non-verbal communication, which is gives 93% of information in all life situations, the same as in the learning process, and is attendant of verbal communication, which gives 7% of information.

NIKITINAITĖ, L., 2017. TRANSCULTURAL ASPECTS OF NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION: IMPORTANCE OF NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION IN A LEARNING PROCESS. Socialiniu Mokslu Studijos, 9(1),.