[ASIA CALL 2003 News] ASIA CALL 2003 Abstract from Dr. Charles Ess

[Larry Chong]

Dear ASIA CALLers & Subscribers!

We are very pleased to lease our keynote speakers' abstracts in turn.
This is from Dr. Charles Ess, U.S.A.

Globally yours,

Larry Chong, Chair

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Title: Language, culture, hybridity: towards global citizenship

Abstract
It is a commonplace that learning another language is a gateway to a
different culture and people: such learning is thereby a crucial component
of education for the peoples of an increasingly interconnected and
interdependent world.  But I will develop important differences between two
sorts of goals and reasons for learning another language.   The first are
utilitarian reasons - e.g., language learning for the goal of enhancing one
¡¯s salesmanship and success in an international / multinational business
environment. The second are humane reasons - e.g., in order to better
understand ¡°the other¡± as both human (similar to self) and other
(different from self). Most fully developed, such learning leads us beyond
the linguistic and cultural boundaries of our home, so that we incorporate
elements of both home and foreign culture in a new hybrid identity. Such
language learning is a means to humane goals - goals shared in both East and
West - of becoming cosmopolitan, hybrid human beings.
By more clearly distinguishing between these two reasons/goals, we may (a)
make clearer to our students the importance of language learning - i.e, for
both utilitarian and humane reasons, and (b) perhaps develop more effective
pedagogies of language learning as these are more clearly oriented to one or
the other of these two reasons/goals.

Bio
Charles Ess is Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies,
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri.  Ess studied at the University of
Zurich and completed his doctoral dissertation on Kant at the Pennsylvania
State University. He researches, lectures and publishes on Internet research
ethics and, with Fay Sudweeks, organizes conferences and edits publications
on cultural attitudes towards technology and computer-mediated communication
(e.g. Culture, Technology, Communication: Towards an Intercultural Global
Village, SUNY Press, 2001). He has also published in comparative and applied
ethics, history of philosophy, feminist biblical studies, and philosophy of
computing and information.