This booklet about the cultural background of Vietnam is one of three booklets that serve as a foundation for understanding the cultural diversity and values of Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese students. Vietnam is located on the eastern coast of the Indochinese peninsula and has a population of 56 million. Its history is divided into the…

Using a descriptive personal narrative that marks ethnographic research, this book looks at literacy education in the Amish culture and considers the implications that this perspective reveals for mainstream education. Divided into 12 chapters, the book chronicles the life of an Amish family, the Fishers, focusing specifically on the attitudes…

Our culture draws lines between "races" in a variety of ways. Professional scholars and society in general each have their own set of aims and methods for dividing by race. The professional classifiers have been at times inconsistent and fallacious in their methods. The scientific classifiers (physical anthropologists, for example) assume an…

This paper is an attempt to summarize as explicitly as possible certain empirical findings of classical biosystematics and modern semantic ethnography which may be considered to represent formal universals of human mental structure. The paper offers a formal treatment of the subject of taxonomy, and an application of the formalism to several…

Emphasizing reference resources for ethnological research on Canadian American Indians and Eskimos, this guide constitutes a revised and expanded edition of an earlier student's guide entitled "Canadian Ethnology" and includes both reference sources and annotated bibliographic references for the following: (1) Handbooks (8 references);…

Social Science assumes, as our human experience daily confirms, that social life is orderly. This paper proposes to document the detailed orderliness of actual conversational interaction, show that participants orient to this orderliness, and explicate the knowledge--together with the rules for situated use of this knowledge--which members…

The United States Attorney General ruled in 1968 that all U.S. citzens 1/4 or more genetic descent of the aboriginal people of North America are, for administrative purposes, titled American Indians even though they may be known as Eskimos or Aleuts. The U.S. recognizes tribal groups as sovereign bodies and conducts business and civil affairs with…

Efforts to analyze a case study of the implementation of Program Planning Budgeting System (PPBS) materials for a pilot study in a school district are discussed from a descriptive, ethnographic approach. Antagonism, anxiety, and accusations characterize the extreme we-they split among those interviewed. Anthropology describes such a society with…

To achieve the goal of communicative competence, second language instruction should incorporate the results of ethnomethodology research. Ethnomethodologists are interested in the shared rules of interpretation which members of a culture utilize during their conversational interchanges. "Applied ethnomethodology" in the ESL classroom would mean…

The recent work by sociolinguists is more accurate for consideration of urban dialects than is the analysis provided in the "Linguistic Atlas" materials. The sociolinguists' work shows that the use of nonstandard phonological and grammatical features varies according to one's socioeconomic status, ethnic background, speech context, age,…

Sociocultural implications of ethnicity are explored in this paper. Three main questions are discussed: (1) What is ethnic?, (2) Who wants to be ethnic?, and (3) Why be ethnic? The author notes that in 1960 the ethnic diversity of the U.S. population was such that some 185 foreign language newspapers, 1,660 radio programs broadcast in the foreign…

Through funds provided by the U.S. Office of Education and the Navajo Community College, a major accomplishment was realized in the development of a Navajo Studies Curriculum that reflects the thinking of the Navajos themselves. The most successful aspect of the project was the identification on the part of the Navajos of what they wanted included…

Compiled for use in Indian history courses at the high-school level, this document contains sections on the history, culture, religion, and myths and legends of the Blackfeet. A guide to the spoken Blackfeet Indian language and examples of the language with English translations are also provided, as is information on sign language and picture…

The study presented here examines whether an ethnographic approach to the study of teaching yields new insight into the teaching-learning process. Two-hundred teachers, who differed in measured effectiveness, were recruited from thirteen school districts in the state of California. Each teacher taught two experimental teaching units (ETU's) of…

An adequate description of the total reading process would have to deal with reading in at least three dimensions comprising three different sets of relationships. A model of the process might well take the form of three concentric spheres: an outer, sociolinguistic shell in which text and reader respectively could be related to a particular…