Cultural Variation Patterns

In his paper “Cultural Variation in Styles of Thinking,” Ballard and Clanchy (1984) state that people from different cultures think differently. This also includes their rhetoric, attitudes to knowledge and approaches on thinking and writing. In many cases, students from different cultures bring different purposes for study. ‘Purpose’ in this study is determined as the aims of the students when organize and respond to questions or assignments. Sometimes, students answer the questions based on the previous culture of thinking and learning. This leads to some problems mostly fail to meet the lecturer’s expectations that assess based on different styles. Instead of addressing questions more critically by commenting on certain given texts, some …show more content…
Attitude to knowledge leads to variation in ways of learning, whether they are reproductive, analytical or speculative. In case of Australian education system, each level education is required to meet certain attitude to learn. They are reproductive approach that focused on memorizing and following procedures, this occurred in primary and secondary stages. Analytical approach which is expected to students in tertiary education, this required students to questioning and thinking critically towards knowledge they gained. Lastly, speculative approach for the post graduate and advanced studies that expected to have ability to speculate and conduct research independently. However, these approaches are not totally separated based on those categories, sometimes senior students are expected to think both memorizing and thinking critically or use both logical and humanism for developing critical judgments on advanced science …show more content…
If so, there will be some difficulties for students who move to study on the other cultures. In many cases, what we called conservative attitudes, grow as drawbacks that impede students to be critical. Emphasizing on intuitions rather than logical arguments on training, independency on learning, express the ideas are some examples how these traditional knowledge seems to be very different with Australian university education systems. Approaches that are acceptable in the previous cultures are very often underrated by the Australian lecturers, because they might expect more. To cope with this problem it is important to find other western style assignments as a guideline and get the sense of lecturers’ expectations. Eventually, the students realize that their approaches have to be altered and adjusted to what they should