Communication Between Cultures Essay, Research Paper

It might be looked at as being a culture shock to be plunged into a bilingual. Gary Fortune, the author of A Cultural Plunge , wrote about his experience about being exposed to second grade in a bilingual classroom at La Jolla Elementary School in San Diego, California. This article being about a bilingual classroom in the United States pertains to the subject of diversity in education. I plan to apply the concepts of functions that every school uses, educational differences, and the aspects of multicultural education in the United States.

According to Communication Between Cultures, in every culture, schools serve the functions of helping to form the individual, which means that schools influence the way a person thinks and behaves as a result of what they learn and how they learn it; schools are looked at as being a means of passing a culture s history and traditions to the next generation; and schools also have the function of teaching the informal knowledge of a culture. According to the article, the classroom was formatted pretty much the same way an American classroom would be, but just in a different language.

Most cultures have the same format of teaching, but educational differences in how the content is taught and what specifically a culture emphasizes. All cultures tend to emphasize their historical and scientific accomplishments and minimize the accomplishments of other cultures, according to Communication Between Cultures.

The combination of population and immigration increases has greatly affected the education system in the United States. In most classrooms, many learning styles are considered; multicultural education and teaching styles and language diversity are discussed. According to the article, language diversity was the biggest problem because the teacher could barely speak his language, so Gary had an extremely hard time adjusting to life in a bilingual classroom.

According to Communication Between Cultures, the language diversity in American classrooms is characterized by three instructional approaches, such as bilingual education, which students do not speak the school s language and are taught partly out of school; ESL is another approach to language diversity, which has a goal of teaching English primarily in the school; and the final approach is Sheltered English, which is when students are taught the subject matter in a controlled environment that meets their level of English understanding. Gary Fortune s classroom experience was clearly an example of a bilingual education, where English isn t the primary language and is taught partly in and out of school.

I have described how Gary Fortune s classroom experience coincides with the subject of language diversity within the United States. I have gained valuable insight of how difficult it would be for someone having to learn in an environment unlike their own.