Abstract

The premise of this chapter is that “learning”, particularly learning in terms of students and universities, is capable of being seen as a specific and developed culture. In universities, the central ritual of this culture is the lecture. Nine features of the lecture are discussed here: its performative nature, its organization, its relation to other learning channels, the contexts in which it takes place, the norms on which it relies, the principles and goals it activates, the demands it makes, how it is patterned, and the range of learning events it promotes. A number of these features touch on points which have implications for ESL students, for example, the effect of hierarchical administrative planning on lecture content, the connection between student motivation and strategies used, the coding of values in speech acts, and the domination of classroom activities by broad cultural norms.

Introduction: on the nature of ethnographic understanding

There is a culture of learning which everyone who has ever been a student has experienced. Once we think of learning as a culture, it is clear that it has its own structures, contexts, rituals, universals, significant symbols, roles, status markers, patterns of behavior, beliefs, values, assumptions, attitudes, and even the allocation of praise and blame (together with their consequent rewards and punishments) just like the larger entities we call cultures. And as with fully-grown cultures, it is open to ethnographic description (“establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on.”