The Elephant in the Room: Some Reflections on Language and Culture Instruction

This article is a survey of some historical, cognitive, and cultural features of institutional—particularly government and military—language training, to examine and plot a faster and less effortful trip to proficiency. My thesis is that our own cultural and institutional climates play a crucial role in what our students can learn and who they can become.

Defense Language Transformation Roadmap (2005)

The Defense Language Transformation Roadmap was built out of a need for each Military Department, Combatant Command (COCOM), and Defense Agency to review its requirements for language professionals. The Defense Foreign Language Steering Committee (DFLSC) oversaw the development of this Roadmap and approved its assumptions, descriptions of the current situation, desired outcomes, and recommendations.

Using Individualism and Collectivism to Compare Cultures— A Critique of the Validity and Measurement of the Constructs: Comment on Oyserman et al.

The author examines the following limitations of research on individualism and collectivism: It treats nations as cultures and culture as a continuous quantitative variable; conflates all kinds of social relations and distinct types of autonomy; ignores contextual specificity in norms and values; measures culture as the personal preferences and behavior reports of individuals; rarely establishes the external validity of the measures used; assumes cultural invariance in the meaning of self-reports and anchoring and interpretation of scales; and reduces culture to explicit, abstract verbal knowledge.

Muslim Americans Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream

This Pew Research Center study is the first ever nationwide survey to attempt to measure rigorously the demographics, attitudes and experiences of Muslim Americans.

The Communication of Respect as a Significant Dimension of Cross-Cultural Competence

The purpose of this article is to provide a strong rationale for the importance of continued study devoted to the communication of respect and to suggest a framework for categorizing the culture-general dimensions of the communication of respect.

Cross-Cultural Communication Contributions to Professional Military Education: A Distance Learning Case Study

This article describes the creation of virtual communities for Airmen enrolled in the "Introduction to Cross-Cultural Communication" on-line course. Specifically, the chapter examines the function and consequences of wiki utilization throughout two iterations (n=232) of the course. The findings suggest that the wiki is a tool that improves the quality of on-line culture education for military personnel.

Distance Learning Designed for the U.S. Air Force

The purpose of this descriptive study is to discuss the creation and implementation of a self-paced course designed to present military and academic course content in an engaging and interactive format. The paper reviews the "Introduction to Cross-Cultural Communication" course piloted to 150 Air Force personnel in Spring 2011 and reveals the challenges and opportunities inherent to self-paced courses for student service members and instructors.