Author: Yujue Tang

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:

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:

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

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.

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

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),.

Intervention 1

From my interviews with people who are living in a foreign country, I found language is one of the problems. Sometimes, what they learned from text book are not native speakers speak in their daily life.

Communicating with local is a good way to learn the language but some people are afraid of talking with others because they don’t want to make mistakes. So I plan to create an intervention to encourage people to speak with native speakers.

1. Stakeholders: People who need language (English in this case) help.
2. Platform/medium: Online meeting, Video playing
3. Intentions: To build people’s confidence in their spoken English and encourage them to have conversations with native speakers.
4. Question supporting the intervention: If the compliments from native speakers about the learners’ second language proficiency can boost both their confidence?
5. Activity allowing users to engage: I played two videos for 5 people.
   1. In the first video, a girl acted like she speaks bad English and wants to see how the English teacher responded to her.
   2. In the second video, a guy kept making mistakes in his conversation and teachers correct him patiently.
6. Feedback:
   1. 2 people downloaded this language learning APP and subscribed after watching these videos.
   2. Another 3 people didn’t download the APP but they said they feel more confident to speak English.