Cultural Diversity and Motivation – a Teaching Model for ESP Students
Ruxanda LITERAT
« Universitatea Tehnică » Cluj-Napoca
In a culturally pluralistic societal context it is imperative that students learn how to interact with
and understand people who are ethnically and culturally different from themselves. A teaching
model for ESP students with emphasis on motivation and cultural diversity is presented with some
considerations on cooperative learning, teaching styles and psycho-emotional dispositions of the
engineering students in learning a foreign language to meet the needs of the European formative
education.
Preliminaries
Culture shapes human behaviour, attitudes, and values. Human behaviour results from a
process of socialization, which develops within the context of specific cultural environments.
Hence, humans are social beings who carry within them their individual biological and
psychological traits as well as their community historical background, collective heritage, and
cultural experiences.
The process of learning involves more than intellectual ability and mastery of cognitive
context. It also includes the psycho-emotional disposition of the students, and teachers as well, and
the environmental settings or climates in which teaching and learning take place. The educational
experiences to be relevant they must be perceived as personally meaningful to students.
Considering the teaching principle “Start teaching where students are”, and the fact that
students learn in different ways and under different conditions, the role of the ESP teacher should
reach a new dimension, that of expanding the social, cultural, and intellectual horizons of his/her
ESP students. The assumption of the cultural diversity and the increased focus on the importance of
motivation have determined the reconsideration of all educational decision-making, from designing
curricula to selecting instructional materials, developing teaching techniques and appraising
performance.
The Argument
A multicultural education approach helps educators fulfill the goals of maximizing human
potential meeting individual needs, and enhancing student’s personal motivation, confidence, and
competence, thus creating in individuals a psychological state of readiness for learning, which has a
positive effect upon academic efforts and task mastery.
This argument for academic achievement, cultural and individual identity, justifies, we
believe, the present paper which proposes an ESP teaching model for the engineering students in the
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca with emphasis on motivation and cultural diversity, and the
possibilities to rethink the curriculum for foreign languages professional communication.
The Motivational Model
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The language we use to think and the ways, in which we communicate, cannot be separated
from cultural practices and cultural context. The meanings of a particular language refer to the
culture of a particular social group, and the analysis of those meanings presumes the comprehension
of that culture. Culture can be understood as a learned mix of language,s beliefs, values, and
behaviours that pervades every aspect of our lives. “None of us are to be found in sets of tasks or
lists of attributes; we can be known only in the unfolding of our unique stories within the context of
everyday events” (Paley: 1990, p.xii).
Social scientists (Rogoff and Chavajay: 1995) today regard the cognitive processes as
inherently cultural. Cultural messages are realized in social interaction. People learn through their
interaction with the support of and from other people and objects in the world. To help students
learn may require understanding his or her thinking and emotions as inseparable from the social
context in which the activity takes place. What a student finds personally relevant is a socially
constructed meaning, i.e. it is based on social experience and value.
In today’s cultural diversity landscape the teaching and learning of foreign languages require
effective ways to access and strengthen students’ individual skills as well as ways to include the
understanding they bring to learning based on their social experiences.
Learning engagement is highly determined by emotions which are socialised through
culture. One student, for example, working at a task feels frustrated and stops while another feels
joy and continues. Yet another student with a different set of cultural beliefs feels frustrated at the
task but continues with increased determination. What may elicit that frustration, joy or
determination may differ across cultures because cultures differ in their definitions of novelty,
hazard, opportunity, and gratification, and in their definitions of appropriate responses (Kitayama
and Markus: 1994).
Cultural relevance in instruction can also help the teachers to be aware that the responsibility
for students’ learning should be shared with the institution and the structure of our foreign language
courses. A model for teaching and for planning instruction based on the principle that individual
motivation is inseparable from culture is presented in (Wlodkowski and Ginsberg: 1995). The
Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching is respectful of different cultures and
is capable of creating a common culture within a learning situation that all students can accept.
Teaching represents four motivational conditions that teachers and students can create:
 Establishing inclusion: creating a learning atmosphere in which students and teachers feel
respected and connected to one another
 Developing attitude: creating a favourable disposition toward learning through personal
relevance and choice
 Enhancing meaning: creating thoughtful learning experiences that include students’
perspectives and values
 Engendering competence: creating and understanding that students are effective in learning
something they value.
Cognition is increasingly viewed as a social activity that integrates the mind, the body, the
process of the activity, and the ingredients of the setting in a complex interactive manner (Lave:
1988).
The Teaching Model for ESP Learning
Instructional planning should be integrated with motivational planning. The learning
climate, the milieu instruction takes place, the learning activities designed to accomplish the
specific learning objectives established by the teacher for the learning sequences are critical aspects
in the instructional process, and they become more effective if directed toward enhancing student
motivation. The four motivational conditions (Wlodkowski and Ginsberg: 1995) exert their
influence on student learning in the moment as well as over time. With this reason, I organized an
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experiment carried out with first year ESP students facing a time-limited learning period of one
semester in the fields of mechanics, materials science and civil engineering. In the design of the
instructional plan I included these conditions, and coordinated them, with a particular focus on
selecting the motivational strategies related to suitable learning activities proposed to students.
I will present an illustration of teaching a sequence of learning activities which describes a
two-hour seminar session carried out in a group of 24 engineering students on the subject “The
scientific attitude and the scientific investigation”. From previous experience we know that many
students view research as abstract and often irrelevant learning.
The aim of the session is to make students devise an in-class investigation and develop their
own positive perspectives toward active research. Considering the fact that most of the research is
conducted on a collaborative basis, the ESP seminar models this approach as well.
For the beginning, students are assigned to small groups and encouraged to exchange and
discuss experiences, expectations and concerns they have about research. Each group then shares its
remarks and the teacher records them on the blackboard or overhead projector. In this manner I am
able to understand my students’ perspectives, establish inclusion by connecting students to one
another using the strategy of collaborative learning.
The next stage is dedicated to developing students’ attitude by transposing the second
motivational condition into the question: How do we create or affirm a favourable disposition
toward learning through personal relevance and choice? For the learning activity I ask students to
choose something they would like to research immediately among themselves. The groups have to
decide the theme for their investigation. In the groups I applied this teaching sequence the ESP
students wanted to investigate issues from various areas of interest: sleep, smoking, drugs, video or
personal computer, means of transport and pollution, etc. They also made predictions concerning
the effects produced in/upon themselves as users. The strategy of relevant learning goals engages
student choice, increases the relevance of the activity and contributes to a favourable atmosphere
emerging in the seminar. The students are learning in a way that includes their experiences and
perspectives.
Throughout the seminar, the established research teams develop a set of observations and a
set of questions to ask the students-volunteers. The strategy applied at this time is that of critical
questioning and predicting. Thus, we create engaging and challenging learning experiences that
include students’ perspectives and values. A list of questions and predictions is recorded. The
students discuss their findings and consider questions that might have increased their accuracy. The
questioning and predicting enhance the engagement, and heighten the complexity of learning for the
EST students.
In this way I have created a stimulating learning situation rendering the students more
sensitive to the scientific attitude, and have introduced several notions related to the concept of
scientific investigation and research: hypothesis, experimentation, procedure, motivation,
measurement, associated event, testing, result, reasoning, etc.
The ending stage of the seminar is strategically dedicated to self-assessment in order to
engender competence, i.e. to create or affirm an understanding that students have effectively learned
something they value and perceive as authentic to their real world. I ask my students to write a
series of statements about what seminar activity has taught them from this process concerning
research and investigation in science. Students then exchange their insights and comment on their
colleagues’ positions.
I have applied this teaching sequence systematically in a number of ESP seminars, with the
purpose of producing in my students the positive attitudes toward scientific and technical English,
and the adequate academic skills necessary for them to properly cope with the ESP information
presented in various forms of the scientific style.
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Final Remarks
Education as a means of renewing and revitalizing society has to be consistent with the
contemporary demands of today’s increasingly global Europe and world that are becoming more
diverse, compact, and interdependent. Nowadays, more often professionals and engineers are to
cope with technical information in different languages, interact in different multicultural situations,
and perform in culturally diverse work groups. Thus, the multicultural perspective in education has
imposed the multicultural education’s goal of contributing to the personal development of students,
which contends that a better sense of self contributes to the overall intellectual, academic, and social
achievement of students.
The ESP academic seminar continues to represent an important tool for making FL
education more effective. This paper has argued for a “culture-sensitive methodology”, considering
cultural knowledge in language learning as a necessary aspect of communicative competence and
treating cultural awareness from a teaching perspective as a key component in pedagogical
competence. We advocate for teacher’s sensitivity towards learners’ cultural and educational
backgrounds, and consider ways of adjusting students’ own expectations accordingly. This might be
achieved by organizing certain teaching and learning situations which emphasize the value of group
work from a cultural perspective to foster collaborative learning strategies and create a non-stressful
learning environment for the student.
In conclusion, the ESP seminars should provide diverse formats and activity structures to
allow for variability, cooperative learning, active participation, and novelty in learning; teaching
styles should be modified to incorporate sensitivity to a wider variety of learning styles with the aim
of developing students’ cultural competence to gradually change it into intercultural competence.
References:
Kitayama, S., and Markus, H.R. (eds.), Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual
Influence, Washington, D.C., American Psychological Association, 1994.
Lave, J., Cognition and Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Paley, V.G., The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom,
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1990.
Rogoff, B., and Chavajay, P., What’s Become of Research on the Cultural Basis of Cognitive
Development?, American Psychologist, 50, 1995, 859-877.
Wlodkowski, R.J., and Ginsberg, M.E., Diversity and Motivation: Culturally Responsive Teaching,
San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1995.
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