5/24/2021; Week 6: Response to " Differences in Emotional Expressivity "

 

As I watched Prof. Ivers' class, I recalled many experiences when I was traveling within my country and when I moved to the city where I currently live. I identified a lot with Prof. Ivers about his way of expressing himself for being from Philadelphia and the differences with his wife for being from Nevada. In Venezuela, as well as in the USA, there are important differences in Emotional Expressivity. Usually, people from the eastern and Midwest region are very loud and speak very fast. In fact, if you don't understand the cultural issue, you may think sometimes that they are fighting but they are not fighting, it’s just their way of expressing themselves. This is something that can make people in the central region very uncomfortable, or cause laughter. And when it causes laughter, then they think the people in the central region are making fun and get upset.

My family lives in the central region, but we are from the Midwest and eastern region, and also part of my husband's family are Italians, and Italians also have a pretty strong expressiveness, but they are great, they are good people. Usually, when we would get together as a family and with some friends to justify the fuss we would make with those gatherings before we said goodbye we would sing "happy birthday" so that people would think we were celebrating something and that's why the fuss, but the truth is that the vast majority of the times we sang birthdays none of us were having a birthday, we just didn't want the neighbors to get upset and a birthday party could justify the fuss.

I agree with Professor Ivers when he says that we should take these differences seriously and understand that they are just part of a culture and that it makes us neither good nor bad. The TESOL classroom is full of these nuances in expressiveness and it’s very important to be able to understand this cultural aspect to avoid misunderstandings and to get the best out of our coexistence in the classroom. I confess that this same expressiveness was contagious in my classroom, and in order to avoid being called to attention because of the commotion in my classroom, we ended up singing happy birthday.

References:

Differences in Emotional Expressivity https://video.byui.edu/media/05+Differences+in+Emotional+Expressivity/0_753le546

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