To me the most interesting portion of the HDB readings this week was the idea of the "Episode Hypothesis" where new vocabulary and sentence structures are taught in an episodic fashion. I agree with HDB that this cannot be the only way that English is taught in a lesson, but it seems like a very motivating way to integrate new information for our students. I wish I would've read this last semester since Stephanie, Adib, and I did our Multi-Genre project on Creative Writing in ESL, but I'm glad that we eventually read it because it emphasizes the importance of our students' motivation in learning. It also points out the well established fact that reading is also a great contributor to language learning.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Cross-Cultural Communication & the 4 Skills
In our MCM readings this week the subject was, "Building Awareness and Practical Skills to Facilitate Cross-Cultural Communication". I was really excited to begin reading this chapter because I believe that cross-cultural communication is imperative to our experience as teachers, but when I started reading the chapter I was a little disappointed. It was disappointing because I expected there to be more of a discussion about how both students and teachers can become better communicators cross-culturally, but instead MCM mostly focused on how we can make our students more aware about the culture in the US. I was kind of surprised with this one-sided view just because, even though it is a text meant for US ESL teachers, they mentioned the use of some of these techniques for EFL classes as well, but they failed to acknowledge that English teaching is now a global job market and not just a means for assimilating others into our culture here in the US. Much of the information in this section seemed to be somewhat common sense, but once they started discussing cross-cultural awareness in writing it got a little more interesting. I think that the reason why it became more interesting is because our western view of writing (essays in particular) is far different when compared to many other cultures and so we must be able to explain many of our "strange" ideas such as plagiarism.
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The topic of cross- cultural communication is an very interesting topic to me because it happens a lot of the time to non- native speakers from my own experience. However, I am glad that there are many people that are open or does not take the miscommunication in the wrong way. There were many things that the book brought up that was suprising to me. The point the Thea and Racheal brought up that native speakers do not want to share their notes was interesting to me.
ReplyDeleteYour first comment made me realize the lateral view of the cultural issues brought up by MCM. I think it is also a common thing missing when it comes to cultural interaction in the language classroom. Even though it might not be a problem in the EFL setting, the fact that English teaching is a global job market and many native English teachers would like to go abroad to teach the language, it is necessary that the issue of cross-cultural communication be mentioned. Since the native teacher first needs to learn to respect and value the culture of his/her students before he/she can teach them about his/her own culture (students' L2 culture).
ReplyDeleteHowever, considering the purpose of the article, i think the author has her reason when she focuses primarily on showing teachers how to teach ESL students about the US culture. The expansion of the topic may well be done in another publication which deals with English teaching in a more global perspective.