PEDRO MENDOZA's Page

The impact of globalization on language teaching in Japan

according to Ryuko kubota, Japan is one of the most globalized countries in the world. the numbers speak for themselves, they alone show how many people around the world is getting involved with this country and vice versa.
this can be easier understood with Den Fujita's comment:'' If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years, we will become taller; our skin will become white, and our hair blond.''
this just about says it all. How globalization slowly reels us in to become a single nation, and since usa is the most diverse nation in the world its only natural than it will become the capital nation of the planet.
Kokusaika says that ''English'' is the synonymous of the ''foreign language''.
It also says that the attention to teach this language has increased and intensified more than other language in Japan.
However ''foreign language'' is usually interpreted as ''English''.
The schools in Japan that offer languages other than English has increased significatory.
English is the international language and the acquisition of English is useful for the international communication.
English is the international language that bridges multiple cultures, learning English enables undertanding the world and cultural diversity.
Therefore the international understanding through learning English is to develop attitudes and cross-cultural communication skills rather than knowledge about world cultures.
Also other critics criticized the notion that native English teachers ought to be white Americans or British. Here despite global linguistic diversity and the rhetoric of Kokusaik, the linguistic model tends to be narrowly restricted to certain geographic and racial varieties.


the world is moving forwards and it is only natural that the nations have to get closer and closer in order to survive. and for this we must all speak the same language, metaphorically and actually. this language as we all figure, is english, and Japan, being one if not the most globalized country to date has experienced this better than anyone.


By
Anabel Jatziri Berdon Medina

Student: Oscar Pacheco Linares
Globalization and culture

The impact of globalization on language teaching in Japan

Globalization has led the world to become more and more united, with big differences between nations growing fainter.

According to what Ryuko Kubota stated, Japan is one of the countries that has felt the punch of globalization the strongest. Poll numbers are enough to realize how many people around the world is getting involved with this country and vice versa.
Fast food restaurants are another example of this. Den Fujita, President and Chief Executive of McDonald's Japan told: '' If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years, we will become taller; our skin will become white, and our hair blond.''
Funny of course, but it stands to reason that this joke from Fujita is a way to express how globalization slowly reels us in to become a single nation, probably more American than anything.

Kokusaika says that ''English'' is the synonymous of the ''foreign language''.
It also says that the attention to teach this language has increased and intensified more than other language in Japan.
However ''foreign language'' is usually interpreted as ''English''.
The schools in Japan that offer languages other than English has increased significatory.
English is the international language and the acquisition of English is useful for the international communication.

Also other critics criticized the notion that native English teachers ought to be white Americans or British. Here despite global linguistic diversity and the rhetoric of Kokusaik, the linguistic model tends to be narrowly restricted to certain geographic and racial varieties
English is the international language that bridges multiple cultures, learning English enables undertanding the world and cultural diversity.
Therefore the international understanding through learning English is to develop attitudes and cross-cultural communication skills rather than knowledge about world cultures.

In conclusion I believe that, while the whole world is revolving around the U.S.A as if it was leaving franchises of itself all trough the planet japan is becoming the second capital nation of the world, thus adopting English as THE foreign language.

globalization and culture
professor: Pedro Mendoza
student's name: Karem Mariel Barron Hernandez

GLOBALIZATION
INTRODUCTION

Globalization is nothing if not a fashionable term – it pervades contemporary political rhetoric and is a keyword of both academic and popular discourse on economy, society, technology and culture. In languages as diverse as Japanese and Spanish, the world exists in cognate form – as gurobarizeshon and globalizacion.

Language is the primary medium of human social interaction, and interaction is the means though which social relations are constructed and maintained. While much everyday interaction still occurs, as it has throughout human history, within local networks, large numbers of people all over the world now also participate in networks which go beyond the local. New communication technologies enable individuals to have regular exchanges with distant others whom they have never met face-to-face.


Globalization: a brief survey

Although there seems to be a consensus that we are living in an increasingly globalized world, it is not clear exactly when globalization, as it is presently understood, actually started.

Apart from the debate on whether globalization has been going on for thirty years or 500, there is debate on how far it represents an achieved reality. For some commentators it is essentially a ¨done deal¨; for others an exaggerated or even fabricated phenomenon.

Most sociologists and social theorists take a view that falls between the two extremes described above. They accept that globalization names a real phenomenon, something which differentiates the present from the more distant past, but they also recognize that the process is not complete and has not been experienced in the same way everywhere.

Another area of debate and disagreement concerns the extent to which globalization should be regarded as a homogenizing process.

Arising from such debates about Western hegemony and the relative strength of the local is the question of whether globalization is on balance a ¨positive¨ or a ¨negative¨ phenomenon. Gray (1998) sees the new globalized economy in the form of the Washington Consensus as fundamentally destructive, leading above all to the dismantling of the welfare state characteristic of the world’s most advanced industrial countries in the second half of the twentieth century. Ritzer’s account (1996, 1998) is equally dystopic: he paints a picture of a homogenized global culture of consumption, leading to a soulless and ¨disenchanted¨ existence where commodified experiences replace authentic experience.






Globalization and Language teaching

We noted that globalization changes the conditions under which language learning takes place. In this sphere as in others, some of the most significant changes are economic. People have always learned languages for economic reasons, but in a post-industrial economy it has been argued that the linguistic skills of workers at all levels take on new importance.

The commodification of language affects both people’s motivations for learning languages and their choices about which languages to learn. It also affects the choices made by institutions (local and national, public and private) as they allocate resources for language education.

Technological change is connected to economic change, since the operation of global markets depends on the rapid information flows made possible by new information and communication technologies. But the effects of technological change are not confined to the economic sphere: they are also seen in the development of new cultural forms and the popularity of new leisure activities (e.g. visiting on-line ¨chat rooms¨).

Finally, changing political conditions raise important questions for language teaching professionals.

Globalization leads to patterns of movement across national borders that produce increasingly diverse populations within them, and this may put in question traditional representations of ¨Imagined community¨ of the nation (Anderson 1983). Historically, for example in both Japan and francophone Canada, discourses national identity have relied heavily (though differently) on the idea of a distinctive ethnic ¨Japanese-ness¨ or ¨French Canadian-ness¨.

In England and Japan, national education systems have responded to new conditions from the most part by ignoring them. Provision for the teaching of English as an traditional language in England continues to be based on simplistic and conservative assumptions about the nature and meaning of bilingualism in contemporary societies.

This is related to another consequence of globalization, the tendency to treat languages as economic commodities. In the linguistic commodity market, English has higher value than Korean or Portuguese.

The three national case-studies illustrate something of the complexity of relationship between ¨global¨ and ¨local¨, and the varying impact globalization may have on language and language education in different local conditions. The second part, ¨Zones of contact¨, also examines the global/local dichotomy, but from a different angle. Its three chapters examines sites or domains where language users and language learners attempt to communicate across national and other borders, inspired often by the rhetoric according to which globalization and the associated communication technologies make possible a new kind of more direct and more equal exchange between individuals who are both different and distant from one another. The focus in this part is less on language as code (English, French, Japanese, etc.) than on issues of medium, genre and style. Contributors shoe that these are in fact key issues for language teaching in an age of global communication.

On the surface there are (still) many different languages, but under the banner of ¨effective communication¨, all become vehicles for the expression of similar values and the enactment of similar subjectivities.

Cyberspace is frequently invoked as a ¨zone of contact¨ where distant/different individuals may ¨meet¨ on equal terms, and language teachers are increasingly exploiting the opportunities it seems to offer for real and meaningful interaction between learners and native speakers.

For Catherine Wallace (chapter 6), the idea of finding common ground on which to conduct global exchanges is less problematic. Her chapter presents a critical view of the tendency for politically committed researchers and teachers of language and literacy to respond to what are seen as the oppressive dehumanizing effects of globalization by valorizing the local-community languages, vernacular literals personal modes of speech-over supralocal, schooled and public forms of speech and writing.

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY
BY I. E. MACKENZIE (Review of the book)

We think the book talks about the grammar rules and the methods we have to employ for the adequate learning of the language. The author divide the book in five parts, in the first one, he explains the meaning and the nature of the language, he also talks about concepts, he say’s that there’s a specific word that express something, and we can use that word to do it, we are not suppose to change it. In the following chapters he describes, as we already mention, the grammar rules in English, and so as a few methods to teach or to learn English in an easy way.

HOW DO THE IDEAS IN THE BOOK RELATE TO ENGLISH TEACHING AS PART OF GLOBALIZATION?
We think this book relates to globalization because it talks about linguistic methods, so it helps people to learn a foreign language, and as we think, language it’s a very important part of globalization, because it is the share linguistic code that people is using to communicate with other people all over the world making possible this whole process of globalization. Perhaps in a not very far future, people will have to learn, besides English, another foreign language just to keep update with globalization because now and on we know that there are other countries in the process to become a great power nation.

KAREM MARIEL BARRON HERNANDEZ
DIANA GABRIELA FRANCO AREVALO.
ALMA XIMENA JUNCAL SALDIVAR
SILVIA MICHELLE PERALES HERRERA

hi