Culture As the Classroom

• the Acculturation Model• Teachers job: clue Ss in to what they don’t know• based on cultural differences – sometimes preconceived• Explicitly teach the dominant form of language and

culture that ESL students lack, • students’ cultures become deficits

(Kubota)

• “questions the oversimplified generalizations of language and culture that appear in the recent applied linguistics literature.”

• Ex)- Asian cultures are more collectivistic while western cultures are individualistic

What is Culture?We focus on these in class- in each activity

Hopefully we can implicitly improve students understanding of these factors through explicit discussion of the above…

“ a certain culture is not a monolithic, fixed, neutral, or objective category but rather a

dynamic organism”-RYUKO

KUBOTA

Which Culture

• “which culture should represent the English-speaking culture?”

• “English as a Foreign Language is regarded as English as an International Language (EIL), thereby complicating the question of what constitutes the ‘target’ culture. “

• -McKay

Specific Activities

• Reading/Spelling- vocabulary activity• Having the class think of English words they use in their own

language.• Talking about the different languages that have made up English

• playing map games, locating the origin of certain words in English

Specific Activities

• Writing/Speaking • “The Golden Record”

• Students choose one artifact to send to extra-terrestrials that would explain the totality of the human experience. It can be from any culture.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELnn9V01EiI –The Golden Record

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcwPMeqS97Y&list=PL4D51474AB7BE5595

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDSWGHDPhZY –Advanced Listening

• There is a great game that I am still trying to find the name of so we can use it.

• The game has different rules for different players, but they don’t know that at first

Assignments

Projects

• Students as the instructors. • Example: student-led discussions on an aspect of culture.

• Going beyond presentation to actual discussion

• Presentation/impromptu speech on Cultural Hero/Villain• What emblems/animals are important in different countries

• Researched/impromptu One’s own culture/ Partner’s culture

Textbooks that have this cultural focus

• What World- Milada Broukal• Pathways series

References

• McKay, S. L., & Wong, S. L. C. (1996). Multiple discourses, multiple identities: Investment and agency in second-language learning among Chinese adolescent immigrant students. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 577–608.

Kubota, Ryuko (2012). Japanese Culture Constructed by Discourses: Implications for Applied Linguistics Research and ELT. Volume 33, Issue 1, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/3588189/pdf