第二期(1/4)

I’m Will Arditti, and this week we’re going to talk about what students coming to study in the U.S. can do to avoid culture shock in the classroom. We invite Susan Iannuzzi. She’s an international consultant in English language teaching who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hi. Susan. Welcome. Thanks. So tell me what you did about it? Well. Actually, one of the things that we did at the University of Pittsburgh was we used the sports equivalence, which, you know, is not something we came up with. It’s the three conversational styles of, say, bowling, rugby and basketball. So, for example, the bowling style. That would be considered something perhaps highly considerate, which means that people from those countries would use a style where they would take turns and they would, you know, hold back if they’re a junior person and allow the older person or the more senior person to speak first. And then when they are asked for their opinion they would jump in. Just like you would take turns in a bowling game. Exactly. You go and roll and I’ll wait for you, and now it’s my turn, and everybody knows that there are going to be turns. So that’s the high-considerate model. Yes. Then there’s, you know, the rugby style, which might be the other end. And this is high-involvement. And in this style you’re expected to interrupt other people and the other people are fine with that, they expect to be interrupted. So there’s a sort of rapid changing of topic, changing of speakers and overlapping of speech. This is a style that’s common in southern Europe, in African cultures, in cultures of Latin America, many voices happening at one time. It’s also a style in Russia and Greece.