1. Think of your "English language double": cioè pensare ad un sosia tuo in una cultura anglofona, uno che vorresti essere se dovessi rinascere in Scozia, Giamaica, Africa del Sud, Texas, Galles, Nigeria, California, Australia, India... cioè in uno dei paesi del inner circle o del outer circle (ma non dell'expanding circle) di cui allo schema di Kachru nel nostro RECAP of LESSONS.

2. Document yourself on that double's culture and language: use Wikipedia, academic articles, TV programs you have seen, Encyclopedias, autobiographies, YouTube interviews, etc. Note that you should document people SIMILAR to your double, more than your double her/himself.  For example, if you choose the Australian actress Cate Blanchett, you can read her biography in Wikipedia and watch her express herself spontaneously in a few YouTube videos. But then, DO NOT INVESTIGATE HER ANY MORE. Instead, look for people like her: Australian women born into an upper middle class big-city family, who attended an upper class “ladies' college” where they learned to speak “educated Australian” (not broad Australian like Crocodile Dundee), etc. Remember that you are NOT going to be Cate Blanchett but rather someone from her community, with whom she would communicate very easily because you and she speak the same “language.” If you have a webcam, you could try to find a chat partner from an Australian ladies college and, by quantitative and qualitative questioning, test your hypotheses about Australian language and culture.

3. Then, from your documentation, try to guess (indovinare) the value system of your double. This is the most important part of your task and it is, for now, almost completely subjective. In Italian you can often evaluate a person's way of being from their way of speaking because, through encounters and TV programs, etc., you have created a relationship in your mind between accent and attitudes in fellow Italians.   Since you do not have that experience with the particular variety of English you are studying, you will have to use your intuition – plus, of course, the descriptions made by linguists and ethnographers (and ordinary people, too) on the web. For example, if you want the opinion of non-academic “ordinary people” (doxa) on Australian expressivity, you can google “relationship Australian language culture” and find pages of links. To get more seriously documented “scientific” descriptions (techne, if not episteme), google the same words but using http://scholar.google.com. This will give you university level texts from which you can extract the fundamental characteristics of Australian language and culture. You should have both doxa and techne (if possible episteme, too).

In this phase, you will write entire sentences to express the particular world view of your double.   How many sentences (= descriptions of cultural values) should you accumulate to understand your sosia's culture?  Good question!  A minimum would be five (according to the sociologist Hofstede).  There is no maximum.

4. When you have finished with Step 3, analyze each of your entire sentences in terms of Cultural Dimensions, like those indicated by Beamer (http://patrick.boylan.it/courses/cultural/beamer.ppt). If you want, you can invent your own parameters.

For example, for Bob Marley you could use the dimension "individualistic" versus "collectivist" (and many other dimensions, too) to explain the value of Encouraging one's People to Resist:

|_individ.____ ---------------------------------------------- ___collect.__

But BEFORE you situate Marley (BM) between these two extremes, to give meaning to the point in which you situate him, try to situate yourself (Me) as well.

|__collect.___ -------BM----Me---------------------------- ___individ.__

As an addition point of comparison, you can add the Queen of England, Elisabeth (QE), using the stereotyped image we all have of her, plus the teacher of this course PB:

|_collect.____ --QE--BM--Me--PB------------------------- ___individ.__

In this dimension, the Queen is on the far left because she is extremely collectivistic when she speaks and acts like the “mother of the nation”, treating Britons as one big family.
NOTE: According to a “leftist” political-economic analysis, the Queen should instead be considered, in her real-life relationship to Britons, extremely individualistic. “L'état c'est moi” is, in reality, pure egoism. Your graph should therefore place the Queen on the extreme right:
|_collect.____ --------BM----Me--PB----------------QE---- ___individ.__

This example illustrates how necessarily subjective all evaluations are.

Now your are finished. Anyone can look at this parameter and say: "Ah, now I understand why Bob Marley always sings about the oppression of his people; Marley considers the collectivity first. He is also different from "Me" as an Italian. “Me” considers collectivities – like one's family, clan, network of friends, society – very important; but “Me” does not consider very important one's nation, as Marley does. So “Me” is half collectivist (and half individualistic), whereas BM is totally collectivist.

By using cultural dimensions, you have clarified (and contrasted) the values that you have identified in the language and culture of your sosia's community.

5. Then transform your entire sentences (the same ones you analyzed using cultural dimensions) into maxims, i.e. “rules of behavior”. For example in the case of Marley, you can transform the value of infinite patience into the maxim: "Take it easy, in the end justice will come."  We all have maxims in us – the ones we learned to follow when growing up in our culture. In the case of a stereotypical American, a typical vale is the belief that “with sufficient will power you can succeed in everything and even become President of the United States”; this value is internalized in a typical American in the form of maxims such as “Think positively,” or “Be confident”, or “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.”

6. Repeat your new maxims every morning when you get up and especially before entering class. With time you will probably notice that you have changed your way of seeing things and saying things in English.