5/23/22 Week 6:

Response to:  How is the Difference in emotional expressiveness in our TESOL Class? 

Brother Ivers (teacher in a BYU Idaho), explains Differences in Emotional Expressivity: Emotional expressivity is one of the things that are more easily misunderstood than many other things in cross-cultural differences. It's very, very easy to interpret different ranges—to misinterpret different ranges of emotional expressivity. 

Reading and analyzing these resources impact my perception of this topic, we have the knowledge al the humans in the world have emotional expressions: Sad, happy, angry, etc. It’s incredible how these feelings are universal, but their expressivity is different in each culture of each country or between states in the same country.

As teachers, we go to confront challenges with our students from different cultures, also between them; our success is teamwork with the students for introducing together in every culture and understand how misinterpreted emotions in a TESOL classroom can be or in other spaces, we can use lesson plans when the students can show and share with the class how is their culture, customs, traditions, emotional expressions, combine this with the learning method of the second language, and involucrate the parents for attending this kind of class probably can bring more support to the students to be confident themselves. Also, it's training for us the teachers, to achieve the knowledge about the majority of the cultures, to allow us to know how we can handle situations of misinterpretation of people's expressions in our class. We will have new students each year, of course, new experiences with the cross-culture.  

And what will you do with the Difference in emotional expressiveness in your TESOL Class?  if you have a student from South America and another from Thailand is very easy to misinterpret emotional expressions, Thai people don't like confrontation, they can smile and speak still angry, and the student from South America is direct and can show in public is angry. Well, guess who can resolve the situation? you, it's our task through training that we have and will be acquired in each class, we can guide our students in the way to understand that the differences help us in the goal of adapting to new cultures and languages.