Service Learning Project #4

 My service learning project is spending time with adolescents with behavior problems. Adolescents notice everything and anything that is different about someone. The participants are all from different cultures but there are some that get teased more than other. For example there is a teenager that is from Iraq and is sometimes difficult to understand or has troubles with sentence structure. These are phonological and syntactic problems with his language. Phonology is the rules of how a language sounds and syntax are the arrangement of words or how they are sequenced in a sentence. Every language has different rules and coming into a new culture there is a learning process of these rules. Ethnocentrism also plays a role in this situation. Ethnocentrism is the belief that your own ethnic or social culture is superior than someone else’s.

The adolescents were teasing him about his unique accent and were using ethnocentrism by applying their beliefs how things were supposed to said and didn’t accept other variations.  Most of the other teenagers had learned from an early age how to pronounce words correctly or how to arrange a sentence in English. They didn’t take into consideration that this boy hadn’t lived in America most of his life and was learning those rules for the first time. 

This situation how taught me how to handle these types intercultural situations in the future. It shows that a person’s use of grammatically correct English is not an indicator of their intellect.  This has also showed that I need to try harder to understand what someone is trying to say rather than just awkwardly smile and shake my head.