Week-7 CULTURE IN TEACHING ENGLISH AS AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE

In McKay’s book chapter 4, we have a review of the international language that talked about in chapter 1 and also explore the important role of culture in language teaching. It seems that language learning and teaching have a tight relationship with culture; no matter it is the target language culture or the source language culture. In this chapter, the author gains a conclusion about the primary rationales of culture in language teaching: 1) that culture is embedded in the language itself, particularly in the semantics of language; and 2) that cultural content is motivating in language learning. (P100) Also, the author highlighted the three principles that should inform how cultural content is handed in an EIL classroom. First, the materials should be used in such a way that students are encouraged to reflect on their own culture in relation to others. Second, the diversity that exists within all cultures should be emphasized and finally cultural content should be critically examined so that students consider what assumptions are present I the text and in what other ways the topic could be discussed. (P100) And this is what impressed me most the culture including in the material in EIL teaching. The question of which material is a proper one to choice among the source culture, the target culture, or an international culture has come to my mind.

Talking about the material containing different culture, my own experience makes me feel confused. I remember when I was in middle, high school, the topic given by the English teacher either foreign or local teacher were mainly about the western culture. We have special events to celebrate Christmas and Halloween. We talked about the softball and baseball even though almost no one play them or watch them before. We are familiar with, we thought, Jake-o’-lantern, trick- or-treating, costumes, bonfires, mistletoe, and we got along well with Santa Claus. However, these are only the vocabularies memorizing in our mind. We only use it when we have to find a topic to begin our dialogue with foreigners. What’s more? When we go deeper about the topic, they begin to ask about the questions of Chinese festival, like spring festival, dragon boat festival, mid-autumn festival, etc. Then, we keep silent… Funny! Right? But it is true that most of us were involved in such situation. Of course, we keep silent didn’t mean we know nothing or litter about it, or we lack experience about all of these festival. I guarantee that all of us will dash down our opinion about these festivals if we use Chinese. During the learning process, I found it will be much harder to describe the events or objects from outer and expanding circle. Sometimes, direct translation doesn’t help much. So here comes the problem, what we are learning for in our daily life? And if we begin to think about the role of culture, what kind of materials we are using in the past? What if we begin to talk about the Chinese festivals in the class and expand the vocabularies of all words concerning about Chinese Culture? We can’t deny the advantages about gaining information of western culture, it really helps a lot. However, I think we are losing something, which have close relationship with our life, our country, and our culture.

But such situation really changes a little bit, when I teach in the middle school last year. I found the students were capable to introduce the Chinese traditional festival more easily to their foreign teachers whenever they want. And they begin to search for various cultures from all over the world, not only stick in the western culture. International culture flourished in the materials. You begin to see some faces appearing in the text book have black hair not always blond. From the feedback of the students, they like such diverse culture than only western culture. In this situation, learning English becomes more practical and make the students feel more confident. They are no longer afraid of speaking to the people who are not from inner countries. They have more options to choose the way of communication and how to handle the problems they meet in their life. Still, I concern about the percentage of the culture occurring in the learning materials among the source, target and international culture. How to balance them and benefit the teaching?