Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 78

Paige's (2006) description of culture learning provides a useful frame of reference for assessment of cultural knowledge. He describes culture learning as a process of acquiring and acting upon five primary dimensions of cultural knowledge: (a) cultural self‐awareness—explicit knowledge of one's own preferred values, beliefs, patterns of behavior, and cultural identity; (b) knowledge of culture—knowing the elements of culture, both objective and subjective; (c) culture specific knowledge—knowing about a particular culture other than one's own; (d) culture general knowledge—knowledge about intercultural transitions and experiences, and how to manage them; and (e) culture learning—knowing how to learn about another culture (2006, pp. 40–1).

The interrelated concepts of intercultural sensitivity, intercultural development, and intercultural competence (Bennett, 1993; Hammer, 2008), separate from the five culture concepts mentioned above, are also central to the assessment of cultural knowledge. These terms describe, in various ways, what it ultimately means to be effective in communicating and interacting across cultures. For Bennett (1993), intercultural sensitivity “is the construction of reality as increasingly capable of accommodating cultural difference” (p. 24). Bennett's “developmental model of intercultural sensitivity” (DMIS) conceptualizes intercultural sensitivity as a developmental phenomenon consisting of six primary orientations toward cultural difference along a continuum. Intercultural development refers to the movement through this continuum from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism and the increasing capacity to shift one's frame of cultural reference, cognitively and behaviorally.

The DMIS has been highly influential and of great value to educators working in culturally diverse settings because it provides a way of (a) understanding the challenges experienced by persons living in those situations and contexts, and (b) designing programs that will support intercultural development that are relevant to the learners' existing level of competence.