17.Cultural awareness

is the term used to describe sensitivity to the impact of culturally-induced behaviour on language use and communication.

Goals of Cultural Instruction:l.To help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people exhibit culturally-conditioned behaviours 2.to develop an understanding that social variables such as age,sex,social class and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave. 3. to become more aware of convential behaviour in common situations in the target culture. 4. increase their awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in the target language. 5. develop the ability to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture , in terms of supporting evidence. 6 develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture. 7. stimulate students' intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people.

The outcome is a person’s getting sensibilized to the target culture.

Through what should culture be taught? Through media (texts), students (multicult groups) and activities. Strange as it is but we should start with our own culture (as we aim for dialogue af cultures ). This approach was developed first by Henry Triandis in the Illinois University and named cultural assimilation method. It’s aimed at teaching a man to see situations in cross-cultural interaction from the position of a foreigner.

Which groups of activities are singled out?: a)recognizing cultural images and symbols (exploiting song lyrics, guessing people, odd one out (not belonging to this culture), postcard matches, b)Working with cultural products: students become more confident if the activities are based on realia ( souvenirs, cartoons, travelogues, money, photographs, newspapers, news – radio and TV, stamps). They have the advantage of being actual physical objects to work with. c)Examining patterns of everyday life: holiday photorgaphs, ads about housing available; working with generalizations about the target culture. The home I grew up in – to increase awareness of the fact that culture plays a role in how people define and create their homes d)Examining cultural behaviour, developing tolerance; the basic way of practice here is case study, examining ‘critical incidents’ (these are communication problems which may lead to conflict because people do not understand each other’s cultures. The technical way to present it may be cultural commenting (a video travelogue containing typical cultural features with commentaries for the scenes).

E) Examining patterns of communication (cultural fluency): up to 93% of message can be transmitted non-verbally; Here we should refer analysing TV conversations; role-playing emotions (behaving in your own country like in the target country, e.g. getting acquainted in a Japanese manner; examining structure of a dialogue.

F) Exploring values and attitudes: mostly through commercials to increase student’s awareness of some cultural values; this is done through ‘compare/contrast’ mode. (bottoms-up approach is predominant here ;the big ‘C’ requires mostly a top-down approach, and texts are as a rule sizeable. What should be encouraged while working with them is:

a) Any text of the type is a channel to present culturally related low frequency vocabulary ( e.g. undersell, zoning, toll-gate, doss-house, the war of attrition, reprisals);

b) it is an authentic text, so interpretation of familiar events is culture-conditioned;

c) it should be read through different reading strategies, and at least twice;

d) it has a lot of LU, which are object of study for onomastics and can be themes for mini-reports;

e) it should be read with the help of a dictionary of cultural terms, which by itself can serve as a basis for worthwhile activities;

f) teachers should be morally prepared that students might find this material non-motivating due to seeming familiarity with it or previous unlucky experiences.

If the conditions are met, it is a very safe field for the teacher to be engaged in.

Why did cultural awareness receive such prominence within ELT context?

It was interest fostered by a number of factors:

~ the rise of economic importance of the Pacific Rim countries dictated necessity of correct interpretation of, and empathy for cultures alien for Anglo-Saxon scale of values;

~ the influence of increased immigration into GB from the former colonies, which was a tendency fraught with national tension, if speedy assimilation had not been provided;

~ in lingluistics in the 80s the focus shifted towards study of pragmatics, that is among other things the ways in which language use is influenced by social context;

~ finally, by an interest to a study of non-verbal forms of communication. Hence teaching culture, which E.I.Passov consideres an aim, Galskova – a resource, the aim of which is to develop a person ready for cross-cultural communication;

What culture do we teach? It is customary to differentiate between big ‘C’ (which is achievement culture and comprises history? Geography? Literature? Institutions, art and music) and little ‘c’ (behaviour culture which affects acceptability in the host community and which until recently has been treated in an anecdotal, peripheral or supplementary way).