Written by Betsy Chesney, ESL teacher

I just returned from a mountaintop experience—figuratively speaking:  the annual Regional Academy for Instructional Excellence*, this year at Fall Creek Falls, with other ESL instructors.  We are front-line diversity practitioners in that we teach English as a second language and are also known as ESOL teachers—English for speakers of other languages. *The yearly academy is funded by our state's Department of Labor and Workforce Development Division of Adult Education in conjunction with the University of Tennessee Center for Literacy Studies in Knoxville. It was refreshing and stimulating to meet my counterparts from across the state, swap ideas, and receive training together.  I want to share with you a few thoughts on our own group’s diversity and some of the conference’s content. 

  Everyone teaching ESL is celebrating and nurturing diversity.  My current students at READ Chattanooga are from Sudan, Guatemala, Mexico, Korea, Thailand, Peru, Haiti, India and Italy.  (One student is from India and Italy, so I say that she’s from “Indaly.”)  At the conference, our group of teachers was itself diverse.  We Americans included male and female, African-American and Caucasian, and a gamut of ages.  Besides America, the countries represented among the teachers were Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Panama.  Having more than just Americans greatly enriched the tapestry of the group and its overall ambience.

  Dr. Emily Thrush from the University of Memphis led two of my favorite   conference sessions.  Her background more than qualified her to lead sessions on both diagnosing and addressing cultural language barriers.  A New York native, she has been, according to her Web site (http://cas.memphis.edu/english/bios/thrush.htm), an “Academic Specialist for the USIA/State Department in the Brazil, Czech Republic, Lebanon, Slovakia, Italy, and Germany, and served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in Mexico in 2000-2001.”

Additionally, she has lived in Saudi Arabia.  One of her special interests is “international and multicultural issues in technical communication.”  Dr. Thrush first went into how we think that experiencing the food, history, music and other arts, and holidays of other cultures is really to experience and to know those cultures.  However, Dr. Thrush pointed out that, according to anthropologists, those elements are actually superficial cultural components and that the deeper ones include body language, health and medicine, ethics, ceremonies (including those relating to grieving and death), sex roles, religion, views on achievement / advancement in the workplace, attitudes about employer-employee relationships, concept relating to time, proximics, clothing (sometimes), and more.  I saw in our local newspaper last month an article containing a specific example of cultural differences in the medical arena:  In Mexico and Guatemala, people do not view pregnancy as a medical condition, and therefore, those countries do not place heavy emphasis on prenatal care.

  The proximics piece relates to how close people can get to you before you feel uncomfortable and want to say, “You’re in my space.”  Americans have a low threshold for this; one doesn’t have to approach us too closely before we experience that discomfort or even feel threatened, but Dr. Thrush pointed out that Asians stand more closely to each other when they talk because their countries are more crowded, so the practical becomes cultural. 

  Cultural differences often manifest themselves in some surprising ways.  The way Chinese students write research papers differs greatly from our way; the Chinese simply quote the masters (especially Confucius, who needs no identification in term papers) because they have already given birth to all the great and original ideas. 

PART 2: Cultural Differences in Business. To be continued