Don't think, but look! - Constructing New C2 Knowledge

It is natural to assume that when presented with direct evidence, our students can be counted on to notice patterns and make simple judgements about what they have seen. But, as Chun and Wade's 2004 study of asynchronous computer-mediated communication suffices to show, this assumption may be unwarranted where collaborative cultural exchanges are concerned. In a classic, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink" scenario, students participating in communication exercises designed to elicit cultural knowledge often proved unable to correctly identify the attitudes and beliefs of their conversation partners. As Wade and Chun explain, the issue at stake is whether students can construct new knowledge about another culture, and in some instances, this process seems to be blocked.

Though we could certainly spill a great deal of ink over the interesting psychological phenomenon of seeing ourselves in others - call it "categorical perception" or "projection" if you like - I'm inclined to a more action oriented approach. Chun and Wade point out that this exercise shows that the intervention of teachers as cultural mediators might help students to correctly characterize the contents of the text before their eyes, to see what they could not see on their own. As a prerequisite to intercultural learning, students must be prepared to practice the art of observation. Wittgenstein’s imperative for the study of language is: “Don’t think, but look!” The ability to construct new knowledge in the face of information that does not fit with our established psychological schema is at once intimately linked to the task of language learning and also much larger.

In the conclusion of the study, the authors consider the fact that the students had greater success in creating the conditions for a "sphere of interculturality" when the cultural differences being discussed were more dramatic. German and American responses to cheating are apparently very different, and students generally noticed this. It was in response to the more subtle cultural difference surrounding dating that students were found to be inattentive to C2 differences. Perhaps one way to scaffold the exercise in constructing new C2 knowledge would be for the teacher to prompt students to begin by discussing a topic on which the students diverged significantly along cultural lines, and only later to discuss more subtle C2 texts.