Yelizaveta Zolotukhina
4Th year student
5. Cultural awareness
"A language is part of a culture and culture is part of language; the two are intricately interwoven so that one cannot separate the two without losing the significance of either language or culture." (Douglas-Brown- 1994)
Preparing for your first day at school? Trying to understand if you’ve forgot something necessary?
All grammar exercises are prepared. All vocabulary definitions are understandable for you and your future students. Cool ice-breaking games are already prepared. Seems to be all is done clearly.
But what’s going wrong?
Yes, you have forgotten about it and it is okay for the first time.
Do you know what does the term “cultural awareness” mean?
According to CollinsDictionary, it means “someone's cultural awareness is their understanding of the differences between themselves and people from other countries or other backgrounds, especially differences in attitudes and values”.
But I don’t want you to be nervous because of definitions. You have it enough on your lectures.
Awareness is the piece of culture that someone from a different culture gives a person a chance to adjust and adapt.
Now it is mandatory to prepare the base for students’ ability to get the knowledge of traditions and cultural peculiarities of the English language countries. It is also important for young learners to gain a piece of systematic knowledge about etiquette and cultural and communicational norms of the target language country.
Here, by the period of your internship, you should try to learn how to teach your students some cultural moments of English, American or either Australian cultures.
In this chapter I will try to show you the understanding of what the “cultural awareness” means in real life lessons, what should we use to create of atmosphere of another culture on your own lesson and some practical cases as an example.
Techniques and methods
First
of all, let’s look into basic techniques and methods you can use in
the classroom. There are many techniques but let’s point out most
useful and amazing ones:
What do you think cultural awareness is?
Improve the interest of students to new culture-specific vocabulary based on the given topic. Make them guess the meaning of each word and especially the words that have culture-specific meaning. If the students are in high school you may also try to make them to guess the etymology of a word in question.
Problem solution
Generally, the procedure is to have students read a problem independently and make individual decisions about what they would undertake. Then the students may be grouped into small groups of 3-5 people to discuss their decisions and why it is important to act that way. Then all the groups discuss their decisions and the reasons behind them. Finally, students have to be given the opportunity to see how their decision and reasoning can be compared and contrasted with the decisions and reasoning of native culture of the target language culture.