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Title:
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Assessing Cross-Cultural Awareness of University Second Language Students and Non-Second Language Students
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Author:
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Brooks Peterson
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Minnesota
, Department of Second Languages & Cultures
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Degree Date:
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1997
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Sociolinguistics
Language Acquisition
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Subject Language(s):
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French
German, Standard
Spanish
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Director(s):
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Helen Jorstad
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Abstract:
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Today most second language classrooms have culture learning goals and include a cultural component. Yet little agreement exists on what type of c ulture to include and it has not been shown that students demonstrate gains in cultural awareness after having studied a language for several years. This study is a comparison of the level of cross-cultural awareness demonstrated by 151 U.S. second langua ge students who had taken at least two years of university-level French (N=32), German (N=46), and Spanish (N=47), and a group of U.S. college students who had not studied a second language (N=27) from a small Midwestern private liberal arts college. A 50-item instrument called the Peterson Cultural Awareness Test (PCAT) was developed . The untimed test was taken in English by all subjects and afterwards 12 subjects were randomly selected for 20-minute interviews in English.
Factor analysis was used to confirm that four distinct cultural scales were being measured, based on the work of Hofstede (1980): power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity. Analysis of variance showed that the second language groups did not consistently outperform the non-language group in their understanding of U.S. culture or a second culture; in most cases the French group performed significantly more poorly than the other groups and the German group performed significantly better than the other group s. The Spanish group performed similarly to the non-language group. The interviews showed that the PCAT instructions and 50 test items were clear and that the test items reflected four distinct culture scales.
It is recommended that the second languages and cultures field adopt a coherent framework for defining and studying cultures and then assessing cultural awareness. It is recommended that such a framework should serve as a tool for research and practice in various business and academic settings such as cross-cultural training, preparation for overseas study, the second language classroom, and further application of an instrument such as the PCAT.
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Page Updated: 26-Nov-2009
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