I am Brian Champion, the Political Science and World Politics Librarian and Coordinator of the House of Learning Lecture Series. We welcome students, colleagues, faculty, and invited guests here today to hear Professor Paul Warnock from the Department of of Asian and Near Eastern Languages deliver an address entitled, Language as Cultural Behavior, Context, Culture, and Communication. The library sponsors two main lectures and lecture series.
House of Learning lectures and the Alice Louise Reynolds Women in Scholarship Lecture. Through these lectures, the library brings together scholars and students to engage in a civil discussion of ideas, and in so doing, the library contributes to building a learned community which fosters the faithful life of the mind. The House of Learning Lecture Series title is taken from the 88th section of the Doctrine and Covenants, verse 119, where the Lord instructs the children to be wise and to be the Saints to prepare every needful thing, even a house of learning. Because the library is the campus repository for the literature of all academic disciplines and scholarship, the library is well positioned to be considered BYU's house of learning.
The Harold B. Lee Library takes seriously its campus role as the intellectual heart of inquiry and knowledge and is honored to provide this house of learning lecture today. about today's lecturer. Professor Paul Warnock received a BS degree in computing science with a Japanese minor from BYU in 1983 and an MA in Japanese in 1989, also from BYU.
In 1996, Professor Warnock was awarded a PhD from The Ohio State University and subsequently taught Japanese at Columbus State Community College in Ohio and Middlebury College in in Vermont. He returned to BYU in 1995 where his teaching and research have focused on the Japanese language and the teaching of Japanese. He has served in the Association of Teachers of Japanese and recently completed a term as a member of the Board of Directors of the ATJ.
The author of over a dozen articles, papers, and conference presentations, Professor Warnock is a dedicated teacher whose great love of Japanese and the Japanese people give inspiring texture to his classroom and to the mentoring he provides his students. It is a delight and a distinct pleasure to have as a House of Learning Lecturer today, Professor Paul Warnock. Thank you. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here this afternoon. As noted, I teach Japanese, and I'd like to share some thoughts today having to do with language and culture, language learning, and talk a little bit about some things we do in our program, and conclude with some things that I think...
might be applicable for all of us whether we're interested in a second language or not. In language teaching and learning, people often talk about culture, but this can be understood different ways. I'd like to start with one classification. outlined by a man named Hector Hammerly in 1982. He identified three areas or types of culture. The first is achievement culture, and this would include architecture, music, theater, art, literature, the things that would be considered the hallmarks of a civilization.
He also identified a category known as, which he termed informational culture. These would include the cultural aspects of the culture. would be facts about a country that are considered to be important, such as geography or the government system, the political system, history, population, family structure, those kinds of things.
And finally, he identified the third category as behavioral culture. These would be facts about a country that is considered to be important, such as geography, or the include day-to-day life, how to negotiate life within the society, things like how to make greetings. In Japan, the case of Japan, the fact that you take off your shoes before entering someone's home or the fact that it's acceptable to slurp noodles when you're eating, how to deal with, how to respond to compliments.
Those kinds of things are behavioral culture. And these kinds of culture are treated different ways in different programs. But I would suggest that it's the behavioral culture that's most important in a language learning class. Achievement culture and informational culture can be gained in other means, but it's the behavioral culture where language and culture come together in the most important and most significant ways. Later on in 1996, as part of a national effort to identify standards related to language teaching and language learning, a committee identified culture in these ways as including perspective.
which would be the meanings, attitudes, values, and ideas of a culture, practices, the patterns of social behavior, social interaction, and the products, the books and things that a culture produces. More recently, well, I wanted to make one point, and there's always that range between traditional and modern and the integration of foreign elements as well. Gala Walker in 2000 identified that native speakers might see their culture in three different ways, or it could be classified into three different areas. One would be revealed culture.
These would be things that a native speaker might see in three different ways. native speaker would be happy to share about his or her own culture, the things that they would want other people to know, other people to understand about his or her own culture. Ignored culture would be those things that a native might not even think about.
until a non-native might demonstrate that there's a different way of doing things. Suppressed culture would include those things that a native may not be proud of or may not want to share with someone from another culture. And again, in this classification, I would suggest that ignored culture is the most important in a language learning class because these are the things that do apply to daily living and daily interactions.
And since... by definition they are not necessarily salient or thought about by native speakers. These are all the more important for us to deal with in a language learning class so that students of that language and of that culture will know the very areas where they might run into problems if they do things contrary to expectations in the target culture. Usually people think of culture as something that a particular group of people have. It's more than that.
It's also something that happens to you when you encounter them. Culture is an awareness, a consciousness, one that reveals the hidden self. and opens paths to other ways of being. Culture has to do with who you are. You can't use a new language unless you change the consciousness that is tied to the old one.
Culture changes the way you look at things. I use this example in some of my classes. Obviously, you can see it before it shows up here formally.
But in some of my intermediate reading classes, I ask students if they can read this. And it has the appearance, certainly, of Asian characters. But if you look carefully, it's really English.
When you know that, I think you can identify what it is. But when we're talking about going from one culture to another culture, we often have to change our perspectives and our perceptions to think of things maybe in a little different way than we may have before. Same idea is captured in this Farside cartoon. Cultures may make distinctions that we don't think about from our own culture.
I'm not sure if you can read the... caption there says, vive la difference. Those frogs might see things in each other that we can't identify as being not part of their culture. Cultures identify things that are important to them that may not be salient to those coming from other cultures. It's also exemplified in this far side cartoon.
We have a group of Vikings eating dinner and the caption is, uh, question, can anyone here tell me what Hanson there is doing wrong with his elbows? eating with his elbows on the table. We may not think of Vikings as having good table manners but again there could be things in other cultures that might be surprising to us or might be something that we had not considered.
Culture shapes the minds of individuals. It's individual expression inheres in meaning making, assigning meanings to things in different settings on particular occasions. Meaning making involves situating encounters with the world in their appropriate cultural context. Although meanings are in the mind, they have their origins and their significance in the culture in which they are created. Nothing is culture-free.
If pedagogy is to empower human beings to go beyond their native predispositions, it is to empower them to go beyond their own predispositions. It must transmit the toolkit the culture has developed for doing so. This is an article that appeared in a national magazine a few years ago about Captain Cook. And it indicates there was a time when they were just off the coast of New Zealand and a Maori man with his son came on board and the Maori man was gesturing.
And the sailors had been talking about this idea that the Maori people wanted to sell their children or were trying to sell their children to the sailors. So that's how they interpreted it. fact that wasn't at all what was happening. The man was merely trying to get a shirt for his son and Captain Cook of that experience wrote, this story though extremely trifling in itself will show how liable we are to mistake these people's meaning and to ascribe to them customs that they never knew even in thought. So culture is a lens through which we see the world.
We have certain perspectives or perceptions or experiences that lead us. us to look at things a certain way, which may not be valid when we're talking about another culture. Another quote, culture is man's medium. There is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture. This means personality, how people express themselves, including shows of emotion, the way they think, how they move, how problems are solved.
However, it is frequently the most obvious and take it for granted, and therefore the least studied. aspects of culture that influence behavior in the deepest and most subtle ways. Culture is more than mere custom that can be shed or changed like a suit of clothes. Culture controls behavior in deep and persisting ways, many of which are outside of awareness.
This would be what Walker was talking about as ignored cultures, the things that we don't even think about. They're just part of our being because of the experiences that we've had as we've grown up. And culture involves learning another culture.
involves learning another way to be, if I could share a personal experience. As was noted before I began my involvement in academics, I was working in computer software development. And our company had a contract with a company in Japan, and I spent six weeks there one time working on some software.
At the end of that six weeks, my boss came over from the United States for some meetings, and during those meetings, I was the interpreter. After those meetings, a woman that I'd worked with a Japanese woman came up to me in the hall and said, you know, I forgot you speak English. And I thought, how in the world could that be possible? You just look and obviously you know the person is not Japanese.
But as I thought about that, I think what she was saying is that she saw a different cultural persona from what she was used to when I was speaking in Japanese and now when she saw me speaking in English. This is an account of something that is now over 250 years old, but it says on June 17, 1744, the commissioners from Maryland and Virginia negotiated a treaty with the Indians of... of the Six Nations at Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The Indians were invited to send boys to William and Mary College. The next day they declined the offer as follows. We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges and that the maintenance of our our young men while with you would be very expensive to you.
We are convinced that you mean to do us good by your proposal, and we thank you heartily. But you who are wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things, and you will therefore not take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience of it. Several of our young men, of our young people were formally brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces. they were instructed in all your sciences.
But when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods. Neither fit for hunters, warriors, nor counselors. They were totally good for nothing.
We are, however, not... the less obliged by your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. And to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them."Gary Larson seems to have a... of capturing intercultural kinds of things, in my opinion. Here we have a dinner table and an elephant's there, and you might be able to see that the cups are all knocked over. And the elephant says, well, I beg your pardon, but where I come from it's considered a compliment to let fly with a good trumpet. after dinner. When we're talking about the language learning process and helping our students to become someone in another culture, it's not enough for them to say, well that's how we do it where I come from. We want them to understand the norms, the expectations of the target culture as well. For most people, including Americans, the distinguishing mark of cross-cultural interaction is the disappearance of the familiar guideposts that allow them to act without thinking in their own culture. Routine matters become problems that require planning or conscious decision making. They may not know when to shake hands, nod their heads, ask a question, express an opinion, or maintain silence. Faced with these cross-cultural uncertainties, people tend to impose their own perspectives in an effort to dispel the fear of the world. the ambiguity created by the unusual behavior of host country nationals. They are unlikely to suspend judgment about differences in behavior because they assume unconsciously that their own ways are normal, natural, and right. So it's this very area which is the most challenging when we're talking about language learning to help students, first of all, understand the different parameters in the target culture and shift their thinking to be able to operate in those ways so that it becomes normal, natural, and right. for them in the target culture. This is a picture of a Japanese bath. For those who have not seen a Japanese bath before, there are probably several questions that immediately come to mind when you look at this picture. For example, why is the hose of the showerhead outside of the tub? Why are the soap and the soap in the tub? and there's shampoo and all of those kinds of things outside of the tub. In Japan there's a different culture related to how a bath is taken and even when a bath is taken. Most people in this culture take a bath or shower in the morning. In Japan traditionally people take a bath in the morning. a bath at night. But in Japan, people clean up outside of the tub and then soak and enjoy the hot water in the tub after they're already clean, which is why the bath is set up this way. But again, for someone who has not experienced that before, there's no guidepost to help us know how to deal with the situation. This is a picture from the Olympics in Beijing last summer. These women are wearing what I guess we would call the standard uniform or dress for track stars or track athletes. You may have also noticed this woman in the Olympics, same Olympics. This is a woman from Bahrain. I'm sure she is just as interested in reducing wind resistance and just as interested in running as fast as she can, and yet she dresses quite differently from all of the others. To them, I'm sure her dress is unthinkable. to her the other dress is unthinkable even though she's anxious to run her best for her being muslim the modesty trumps the other considerations so again different cultures have different ways of doing things that seem in their own realm to be normal natural and right Again, another Farside cartoon. We have a human and a sea creature, both with the same intent, both with the same motivation, but it's realized in different ways, in some ways which might even be completely opposite. Edward Hall has said that a high context communication or message is one in which most of the information is already in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message. A low context communication is just the opposite. In other words, the mass of information is vested in the explicit code. Japan is a culture that is considered high context. In other words, there's a great deal of shared information, and so less has to be explicitly indicated in words. English, or the United States, on the other hand, is a very low context culture, and so things are spelled out quite explicitly. Human beings as social actors in their cultural worlds take for granted that they are acting in relation to others who share a history and a set of common experiences and understandings of experience. So again our goal in language learning is to help students understand the cultural norms, the ignored kinds of culture, the behavioral kinds of culture, the things that most impact their day-to-day interactions and relationships as a part of learning the language. It's far more than And just the linguistic code, it's the cultural code. And I'd like to say a few things next about language, and I'm going to use obviously several examples from Japanese. Now these are just one example. Similar things can be done or said about other language pairs as well. So I'm not trying to say this is unique about Japanese, but I'm just trying to give you a flavor of the kinds of things that we're talking about in the case of Japanese. Supposedly these are all attested artifacts, but on a Budapest menu. Special today, no ice cream. Outside of Mexico City Disco, members and non-members only. At the then Leningrad Airport in the 1960s. This is Leningrad Airport and you are welcome to it. In a Bulgarian hotel, if you are satisfactory, tell your friends. If you are unsatisfactory, warn the waitress. Detour in Japan, detour sign, stop, drive sideways. From an information booklet about using a hotel air conditioner, cools and heats. If you want just condition of warm in your room, please control yourself. For those who know the language from which these were translated, I think we can see why things turn out the way they do. For example, in the case of the Japanese stop, drive sideways, if you think about what might be said in Japanese, you can see... even though it doesn't quite make sense in English, why it happened this way. In another Japanese hotel room, pleased to bathe inside the tub. Now, obviously, there are some language problems here, too. But if you were going to Japan for the first time, you were in a hotel room, and you were in a in a hotel in Tokyo, you walked into the bathroom and saw this sign. Besides that language problem, culturally you'd probably wonder what in the world this is talking about. But given what we just saw about baths in Japan, it makes sense when you know that culturally what they're trying to say is that the bath in this hotel room is a western bath, therefore please bathe inside the tub rather than outside as though it would be in a traditional Japanese bath. Upon first seeing this, one's thought might be, that must be some bee. But again, when we understand that in Japanese there are no plural markers, we see how this kind of mistake might happen. A colleague... A colleague reports that one time when she was in Japan, she left a wake-up request at the desk. The next morning, the phone rings, she picks up the phone, and the voice on the other end says, your time has come. So again, when we understand the Japanese that's in the mind of that person at the front desk, there's some sense to this, there's some logic to it, even though we lose something in the translation. Japanese is what's been considered, for native English speakers, a truly foreign language. A truly foreign language is one that is linguistically unrelated to English and is spoken in a society that is culturally in marked contrast to U.S. society. So for native English speakers, Japanese is considered a truly foreign language. For native Korean speakers, that wouldn't be the case. This doesn't mean that Japanese is more difficult than other languages. It just means that for native English speakers, there are more... differences to have to deal with. In the case of Japanese, it does have a complex linguistic code and a complex cultural code. And in Japanese, there is no neutral speech style. Every time we say anything, it reveals how the speaker views the relationship with the listener and the relationship with any other parties that might be talked about. So every speech act, comment is made in Japanese, it reflects choices involving group affiliation and the status, age, and gender of those who are involved in the conversation. So when learners are going from one culture to another, they're going to be certain features or certain aspects of things that they have always paid attention to when they've conversed in their native language. Some of those may not be relevant anymore in the target culture. Conversely, there might be a number of things that are relevant in the target culture that they've never thought about and now they need to start thinking about them. Just a few of the cultural characteristics of Japanese. One is the importance of affiliation. There's always an identification with the groups to which one belongs, whether it be the company or the section of the company or the neighborhood or the other kinds of groups that one belongs to. That always is an identifying or identification for the members. of that group. And in Japanese society, connections and relationships are very important. And we see these cultural values played out in the way language is used in interpersonal interactions. Also, Japanese is a vertical society. And so we have what are called honorifics, where Language changes based on the relationship, the vertical relationship of the person that one is speaking to or speaking about. Also politeness. And these kinds of things are represented not only in words, but also in grammar. Also in Japanese, there's a general to specific orientation or a large to small orientation. So, for example, traditionally, when people give their names, the family name comes first, followed by the given name. It's that larger group, the family, which is the biggest part of the identity. And that affiliation, again, that in-group, the association with the family that becomes important. Also in giving addresses. In the United States, when we give an address, we usually start at the most precise piece of information, which is our house number, and then we go to the street, and the town, and the state, and so on. In Japan, it's just the opposite. It's the largest unit first, so the prefecture, and then the city, and then the area, and then finally the house number. The same we see with dates, where year comes first, followed by month, and finally the date. Also, Japanese is a very other-oriented society. In sharp contrast to the United States, which is a self-oriented society, there's an awareness of... of face. How are my actions going to impact or affect other people? And there's an effort, in most cases, to avoid saying or doing things which might bring shame or embarrassment to someone else. Also, there's a sense of personal responsibility, a strong sense of loyalty and duty and harmony and modesty and reserve. And all of these kinds of things impact the way language is used, how we deal with compliments, how we deal when someone thanks you. The cultural approach is very different. from what happens in the United States. In the U.S., when someone says thank you, we say you're welcome. In Japan, someone thanks you by saying arigato gozaimasu, and the customary response is doitashimashite. And so people tend to think that doitashimashite means you're welcome because it fits the same slot in the conversation. But if you think of literally what those words mean, it's something more like what have I done to merit your thanks? What have I done to merit your compliment? Why are you thanking me? So it's a very different kind of thing that's happening in that situation. Again, a personal experience, when you're complimented in the United States, it's customary that we say something like, thank you, to acknowledge that compliment. In Japanese society, we kind of decline it by turning it aside or downplaying whatever brought about the compliment. After I'd spent time in Japan, my first experience there, I was in college and I remember someone I knew complimented me and I can't even remember what it was about. about, and in Japanese fashion, I tried to minimize what it was she was saying, and she got angry. She said, here I am trying to give you a compliment. You should be polite and accept it. But in Japanese, the way of accepting it is to minimize or decline or turn aside the thing that has been said. Also, in Japanese society, persistence is an important value. In this culture, when we take leave of our friends, we might say things like, have a nice day, or take it easy. In Japanese, they would say something that would make them happy. that means something along the lines of hang in there or fight or stay with it as opposed to taking it easy, you know, hang in there, stay with it, fight hard. Some of the linguistic characteristics of Japanese. The verb comes at the end in Japanese society, in Japanese structure, and everything else can be quite flexible in the order that it's placed. Also, the ellipsis, things are often omitted. It's very common that a subject and an object can be left out of a sentence, and the full sentence can be just the verb. That's considered full, complete, grammatical, and well accepted. In fact, there's one scholar who has noted, in noting the fact that Japanese subjects are left out so much in a sentence, he said, rather than ask when we should leave out a subject in a Japanese sentence, it would be more appropriate to ask when we should put one in. Also, it's a topic comment language rather than a subject. subject predicate oriented language. Again, honorifics we've talked about. It's a heavily inflected language. For example, the case of if. In English, if we want to say if, we just put that little word right in there for the conditionals. But in Japanese, we have to conjugate the predicate of that clause in order to have the meaning of the conditional, and there are different ways of doing that even so. There are four different writing systems, including romanization, which is used to some extent, and Japanese is a pitch accent language rather than stress accent language. It's a situation-focused rather than person-focused language. So, for example, when we talk about possession, in English we say, I own or I have. The corresponding phrase in Japanese means something more literally as, for example, if I were to say I have a computer, the Japanese corresponding phrase would be more literally, a computer exists, there is a computer. Also, we often invite people to do things in English culture by saying, do you want to come? We're having a party. Do you want to come? But in Japanese, that want to form is never used in making invitations, and it's not used with those who would be considered socially superior. In talking about others'feelings, it always has to be indirectly. We could walk outside, and someone might be standing there shivering, and we could say, oh, he's cold. But in Japanese culture, it's not appropriate to say that directly. We'd have to do it indirectly. something like he says he's cold or he looks cold or he seems to be cold without talking about someone else's feelings and thoughts directly. Pronouns, there are several first-person and second-person pronouns in Japanese, and they're hardly used. And we never use pronouns with those who are considered social superiors. Passive and causative constructions are used differently in terms of function in Japanese as opposed to English. So these are some of the kinds of things that we're dealing with in the case of teaching Japanese to non-native speakers of Japanese. And all of these things play out in the interaction... between culture and language. Everyone who's dealt with other languages knows that there's that balance between translating the word directly and translating the concept that's expressed by that word. Some challenges that we deal with in Japanese, even a couple of words or concepts that are very common in this culture that we commonly talk about, there are words for those in Japanese, but based on their cultural background and history, they mean something completely different. talk about God, we have to talk about what we mean by that. The word itself doesn't carry the same feeling and interpretation as it may in this culture. The government, U.S. government has identified different groups of languages depending on the average amount of time it takes for a learner to develop an arbitrary level of proficiency. In group one languages we have Afrikaans, Dutch, Danish, French and so on. And to reach, we'll talk about an average learner to reach a level of two which is considered advanced. It takes 16 weeks or 480 hours of study at the Foreign Service Institute in order to order to reach that level. Level two languages, group two languages, Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi, and so on, German, to reach that same level of two for an average learner can take 24 weeks or 720 hours. Group three languages, which include Czech, Finnish, Hebrew, and so on, in this case of the average learner reaching a two, it happens to be the same as group two languages, but other levels it differs. Group four. The score includes Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. In order for an average learner to reach that same level of 2, proficiency, it takes 44 weeks or 1,320 hours. Because it is a truly foreign language, the differences are great not only culturally but also linguistically. So if you think about that, the Foreign Service Institute says 1,320 hours is 44 weeks. That means they have 30 hours per week or 6 hours a day of language study. In a university, you can study for a year. university setting we don't quite have that. We have one hour a day for five hours a week with 75 hours a semester, 150 hours a year during an academic year. So to reach that goal, that same goal of 1,320 hours, it's going to take almost nine years. I haven't directly asked anybody, but I think it would be hard to convince any student to stay here nine years to reach that level. And so what we're dealing with is trying to make our pedagogical approach. as efficient and effective as possible on the one hand and secondly to help learners develop self-managed learning skills and an orientation towards lifelong learning so that even after they finish the four years here in the program they'll continue to progress even after they leave another way to think of cross-cultural interaction might be to relate it to different games let's suppose that United States culture is like baseball Japanese culture is like tennis And so for learners who want to go from the United States to Japan, native English speakers learning Japanese, they're going to have to shift their thinking a little bit from baseball to tennis. Well, as they first encounter the tennis environment, they're going to see a tennis racket which In their mind will relate somewhat to the baseball bat. They're familiar with the baseball bat. They know the ball comes, they swing the bat, and they know what they're supposed to do with that. Now the tennis racket is going to look a little bit differently. The ball is about the same size, but it will be a little different. But they're going to have a basic idea of what has to happen. to happen in cultural interaction. But what happens when that ball actually comes? Based on the baseball experience, what's desirable in that context is to hit it over the fence. So now when they're thinking baseball, when the tennis ball comes, they swing the racket, there's a chance they might swing for the fence, which in a baseball context is wonderful, but in a tennis context doesn't help you further the game. Another far side cartoon. We have some dogs here. Maybe you can see their tails. It says, at the Dog Comedy Film Festival. So again, learners, we need to help learners understand that emotions might be this... same. Intentions might be the same, but the way those are manifest in the second culture may not match at all what happens in the native culture. Let me make a few observations about the language teaching and learning process as we have I've implemented it here at BYU. I often tell my students in beginning classes, our primary goal is not to help you become comfortable speaking Japanese. And that may come as a shock to some and may be very disappointing to some. But I go on to explain that our goal is to help them reach the point so that Japanese people are comfortable with them when they're speaking Japanese. And that doesn't always happen at the same time, but it's the second one that is our primary goal. And for that reason, reason, I ask them to shift their thinking a little bit. The question is not simply, how do you say this in Japanese, but rather we need to ask, given this situation, in this circumstance, what is it that Japanese people do? What is it that Japanese people say? The answer can vary greatly between those two approaches. To learn to play the piano, certainly we need to know how the notes on the page correspond to the keys on the piano. It helps if we know the time signature. It helps if we know the key. All of those things are important as we try to learn. But that's not enough, is it? We also have to practice. Same thing is true in coming back to baseball and learning to pitch. It is important to know where to put the fingers on the seams of the baseball. It's important to know how to flip the wrist. But it's not just that, it's the practice that comes with it. In fact, I read once a long-time baseball coach said, each player needs to throw a ball a few thousand times before he or she gets the smooth style of a decent throw. We have kind of identified two different approaches or two aspects of learning that we deal with in our language program because there are two different kinds of things. Language learning is learning a skill. It's not just amassing a body of facts about lexicon or facts about grammar, but it's learning to do new things. The mouth is learning to make new sounds. The body is learning new body language. It's learning a new skill. One long-time educator said, within the brain we develop two distinctive memories. Procedural memory involves skills and habits that have been practiced until they are automatic and unconscious. Declarative memory includes our general knowledge and life experience. experiences that can be recalled on demand. A teacher needs different teaching strategies to develop these two types of memory in the student. So we have what we identify as declarative knowledge. There are many fields which talk about this and also procedural knowledge, the difference between knowing that and knowing how. One example, this morning before I left home, I tied a tie. I have procedural knowledge to do that. I didn't think about it, I just tied a tie. But a few years ago when I was trying to teach my son how to tie a tie, I realized that I do not have... have the declarative knowledge. I could not tell him what to do. Move this over that or under here or that. I could not do that. And I couldn't even stand face to face and watch him do it. I had to stand behind him as though I were doing it myself to be able to do it. to do it. So that's an area where I have procedural knowledge but not declarative knowledge. Several years ago when one of my daughters was three or four, we started talking to her about learning to play the piano and she said, oh I know how to do that. I saw it on TV. In her mind, she had some declarative knowledge knowing that the fingers have to hit those keys but obviously there was no procedural knowledge. So we've identified two types of class. One we call FACT and one we call ACT. FACT class deals with the declarative knowledge. We talk about the language and the culture. We talk about learning strategies. It helps build that support structure so that the learners understand what is the Japanese cultural system all about. What is the Japanese linguistic system all about? Language here is an object then of what we're studying, and ideally we have a teacher who has the same native language as the learners because that teacher has gone through the same experience of learning the language as a non-native and knows what the experience is like as an adult or as a second language learner to learn what it's all about. The second type of class we call ACT class, which deals with the procedural knowledge, which is a language that is not just a language. all application and practice. We try to create there in that hour of class time a microcosm of Japanese society and culture. And so that class is conducted exclusively in Japanese, even in 101, even from the beginning. And we go through a process of recycling so that students can come back to the same information over and over and over again in different kinds of contexts. So the focus is on performing and language is not the object of study here, but it's the skill that we're going to be using. skill that we're practicing. And ideally, we have a teacher who is a native of the target culture who can be a model of the pronunciation, cultural behavior, linguistic ability, and all of those things. So if you think of a game metaphor, fact class is learning how to play the game, and act class is actually playing the game. Confucius said, is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals? And that's the experience that we try to give our students. We look at three stages of language learning, beginning with imitation where you model after the natives that you're interacting with and through that process this language system becomes internalized and from there we go to a point where the learner can then innovate and create be more creative in what he or she does but they do that knowing knowing the parameters a few years ago Kathy Rigby the former Olympian gymnast came to Salt Lake and performed in a play Peter Pan she was the character Peter Pan and in an interview she said the show has even evolved. When it becomes effortless, that's the best place for an actress to be because it allows you to be more creative and that's more enjoyable for everybody. A lot of times students as they come into class, everybody wants to be creative, everybody wants that freedom. But real freedom and real creativity come on a foundation of understanding what the structure is like, understanding what the parameters are. It's the experienced person who can play the piano piece with more feeling and more flexibility. as opposed to the beginner. So we seek to give our students opportunities where they can develop a repertoire of things that they know are authentic culturally, accurate linguistically, and become automatic for them. So the metaphor we use is language as performance, which is again behavior and acting in situated kinds of contexts. I'll skip a few things here. We focus on particularly five elements of performance. If you think of a play, you go to see a play, there are many aspects of that. We focus on these five. Every time language is used, it happens in some place, on some occasion, with relationships between the people, with a certain motivation in mind. Sometimes there's an audience, and sometimes that has an effect on the way we use language. And so we try to provide context for learners to practice the language and practice the culture with these kinds of things in mind. Thank you. Here's one example of how that might play out. There's a Japanese phrase which means, which is often translated as an apology. But as seen here, depending on the circumstance, it might be an apology, it might be requesting service or attention, it might be making a request, and it might be indicating gratitude. So it's not just translating for the student, and simimasen means I'm sorry. It's giving them a range of experiences where they see how... how it's used to do different things in different kinds of contexts. We organize our courses around, our programs around what we call scripts, where we have in our minds certain, we categorize things in terms of certain kinds of experience. When you walk into a fast food restaurant, you know the kinds of things that you can expect the person on the other side of the counter to say. You know that there are certain things that would never be said in that kind of context. Those are scripts that we organize that we organize in our mind which help us organize and have expectations. When it's a second culture or foreign culture, we don't automatically have that same set of expectations that we can rely on. So it's helping learners to build that repertoire based on scripts and stories that they know can be culturally reliable. Another Farside cartoon. We have a deer dressed up as a hunter coming up behind a hunter and saying, Howdy, any luck? Howdy. The vacuum bag is hot today. Any luck? Howdy. If you look at that sentence, obviously it's grammatically well-formed, but you've probably never heard that and certainly never said it. But we want to help our students avoid the situation where they may be saying things that are grammatically well-formed, but don't fit the situation or don't mean anything given the circumstance at hand. Successful teachers of foreign languages... create learning environments in which they present the particular things that are accepted in and typical of the target culture. Successful learners compile these presentations into memories that underlie acceptable behavior in cultures and languages that they have yet to experience. outside their course or classrooms. In short, they are trying to remember how to behave in a social environment that will occur in their futures. Through the classroom experience, we try to build a repertoire of things that they can rely on when they are in Japanese culture and interact with other people. with Japanese natives and as the wording is here to remember the future. Mencius and other Chinese philosophers said given the right nourishment there is nothing that will not grow and deprived of it there is nothing that will not wither away. If I could conclude with just a few minutes about language in the gospel. First of all, in the Doctrine and Covenants in Section 90 and Section 93 and also Section 88, the Lord invites us to study about other languages and other cultures. In 88 here in this passage, we read that there are many academic areas or different topics that the Lord invites us to study. The purpose being, as he indicates here at the end, that ye may be prepared in all things. when I shall send you again to magnify the calling whereunto I have called you. In other words, the more we know about other languages, the more we know about other cultures, the more we know about other countries, we can serve better. Most on this campus are familiar with this hymn from our sponsoring church. As written in 1957, it originally said, Teach me all that I must know. As you may know, President Kimball, who was an apostle at the time, asked Sister Kimball to teach me all that I must know. Randall to change that to teach me all that I must do. In explaining that he said to know isn't enough. We have to do something. That's true in language learning. It's not enough to have the declarative knowledge. We also have the procedure. knowledge, but it's also true in a gospel context. This is a phrase that Japan has borrowed from China, which in Japanese is read chikou goitsu, which means to have unity in knowledge and action. There's consistency between knowledge and action. Some of you here may not be necessarily very interested in another language or another culture. May I suggest to you that some of the things that I've talked about today have relevance to all of us. because aren't we seeking to become part of a celestial culture? To do that, the process is the same. The declarative knowledge is important. The procedural knowledge is important. The practice and application in a variety of contexts is important. Associating with models who understand the language of a celestial culture, who understand the behavior of a celestial culture, are important for us as we go through that same process. Thank you. Thank you.