Educating Language Learners in Asia: towards Cultural Learning hybridity

Abstract

Among local educationists and Western-born educators teaching in Asia, there is a widely perceived belief in an Asian learning culture as one that emphasises literacy education and the limited practicality of knowledge acquisition. Often this allegedly established Asian learning culture is associated with the unquestioned authority of teachers as the purveyor of knowledge, resulting in the predominant role of rote learning, repetition and teacher-centred learning. The prevalence of this view is most evident among those who are relatively novice to language education industry, as one coming from a Western country teaching in Vietnam, for example, would generally assume more of the implementation of teacher-centred learning. But this view might indicate political naivety to the local educational context. While to some extent the traditional belief in Asian learning culture might hold true, there have been widespread contestations to the belief for its generalisation of cultures (McKay, 2002), failure in recognising differences between language classroom contexts (Kubota, 1999; Savignon & Wang, 2003) and the stereotyping of Asian students as being passive and less outspoken (Kubota, 1999; Zhang, 2012).