Category: Interventions

Intervention with stakeholders

I started my intervention by asking people on the street to play this cultural activity. I changed a little bit rule of this game.

I used my card game to ask participants to answer 5 questions. If there is only one participant, I will represent Chinese culture to answer questions with them. If there are two participants who are from different cultural backgrounds, I will ask both of them to answer the questions. The goal of this game not only is finding similarities but also getting to know about different cultures.

I found my stakeholders randomly on the street. Not everyone I got in touch with was willing to play. At last, I got 3 participants offline. However, these participants didn’t want to show their faces in my project so I recorded the video without filming their faces.

Participant 1:

Question 1: How do you celebrate the new year?

Both of us will have a meal with family.

Question 2: What time do most of the stores close in your country?

Participant 1: Sundays are at 5pm, weekdays they close at 8 or 9.

Me: Most of the stores close at 9 or 10 but some of them at 6.

Question 3: What do you do to stop hiccups?

Participant 1: I will hold my breath for like 30 seconds or just drink a lot of water.

Me: We will have sugar on the mouth or be scared by others.

Question 4: Do you like to take a nap?

Participant 1: Yes, I like to take a nap when I come home afterwards.

Me: Me too. I can’t do it every day but I like it.

Question 5: What are weddings like in your culture?

Participant 1: They have to be very big and grand. The bride has to wear red and the bride has to be given away by her dad. It is common in a lot of cultures. Traditional music is always played in the background.

Me: In tradition, the couple needs to wear red but nowadays people also like to wear white as western-style. We will have a big meal in a hotel. The couple will invite their friends and relatives. They will receive lucky money.

Feedback:

“Thank you for picking me. I think it’s special. I think our cultures are very similar. We have more similarities than the differences.”

Participants 2 and 3

Question 1: What time do most of the stores close in your country?

Participant 2: It depends on the store but normally 7 or 8pm.

Participant3: Same.

Question 2: How do you celebrate the coming of a new baby?

Participant 2: Have a party with family or friends.

Participant 3: Have a party with family or friends too.

Question 3: What meal would you serve if you wanted to help visitors to understand your culture?

Participant 2: Tortilla, paella, jamón.

Participant 3: Escargot.

Question 4: What birthday traditions do you have?

Participant 2: Cake and party with friends and family.

Participant 3: Yes, cake, party, Saturday night and alcohol.

Question 5: What’s your favourite breakfast?

Participant 2: English breakfast for me or tostada with jamon and tomato and oliver oil.

Participant 3: English breakfast.

Feedback:

Participant 2: “This (activity) can help me to practice my English.” “I have a group of people all are from different country, Japanese, Chinese, Brazilian. For me, I like this (activity)to know about other cultures. Yes, it helps me to understand cultures better.”

Participant 3: “Yes, we are same because we need to eat, to live. Spain and France are close so we have similarities but if you ask other people, for example Japanese. The answer can be different. “

The Idea of Intervention

Stakeholders:

People with different cultural backgrounds

Platform/medium:

Game

Intention/goal:

The goal of this intervention is to help people find cultural similarities and get an understanding of each other.

Question supporting the intervention:

If people can get an understanding of others from different cultural backgrounds by finding similarities.

Activity/event allowing users to engage:

It is a game about asking questions. 

Online version

At this stage, I contacted my stakeholders via the language exchange app so it’s easier for participators to play this game with me. I will ask participants who are from different cultural backgrounds to play this game. They can get one point when they find a similarity. Before the game started, I will ask participators how many points they expect to get and then compare it with the actual points they get after the game. In addition, they will be interviewed about their feeling.

12 Questions

What’s your favourite breakfast?

How many main meals do you have a day?

What time do you eat the main meals of the day?

What birthday traditions do you have?

What meal would you serve if you wanted to help visitors to understand your culture?

How do you celebrate the coming of a new baby?

What are weddings like in your culture?

How do you celebrate the new year?

What time do most of the stores close in your country?

Do you like to take a nap?

Is there any tradition when people move into a new place?

What do you do to stop hiccups?

Offline version

I made these question cards for participators to choose questions randomly.

I will ask participants who are from different cultural backgrounds to play this game. Each person can randomly pick a question card and answer this question with me together. If he/she has a similar answer, he/she can take this card. Every person has 5 chances to pick a card and the winner is the person who has the more cards at last.

I interviewed 5 experts who are online English teachers in the UK. They have classes with students from all over the world so they need to have good cross-cultural communication skills.

Based on my previous research on cultural competence, I found people’s attitude is more important than the knowledge of culture.

By interviewing the experts, they feel that people are really accepting in London. And their way of being culturally competent is don’t think different culture is a big deal and try to find similarities with others.

Josh said something that inspired me. He said “We are all the same. We are all human but it’s easy to forget. At a lot of times, we just see what is different. That is the important thing. You shouldn’t think that people are different, it’s better to think we are the same. That always helps. even if we cannot communicate confidently, sometimes is not just even about that, you just have to find some way that you can relate, then understand each other. I think this is a good attitude to have.” 

I created a draft intervention and tested this idea with my stakeholders who are not from China. I started a new topic to find some similarities between us. For example, both of us are introverts, the food we like. And I found it will be easier to have a conversation than just talking about culture.

I’m going to explore this intervention and use similarity to help people make connections.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmZBxIhVbMax1O3xzxbpDCQJhXudXyaEbVOmJCg38XaL6xUw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Responses

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.