Abstract: This article is about integrating culture into foreign language teaching and some reasons, some approaches to teaching culture.
Key phrases: Sociocultural norms, assumptions, a “facts only” approach, a frame of reference, a culture capsule, culture clusters, intercultural connections, culture assimilations, culture mini-dramas, strategies, techniques.
Филологические науки
УДК - 81-132
Ниёзова Юлдуз Toшмуродовна
Учитель кафедры иностранных языков
Каршинский Инженерно-Экономический Институт
Niyozova Yulduz Toshmurodovna
The teacher of Foreign Language department
Karshi Engineering Economic Institute
ИНТЕГРАЦИЯ КУЛЬТУРЫ В ПРЕПОДАВАНИИ ИНОСТРАННОГО ЯЗЫКА
INTEGRATING CULTURE INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Abstract: This article is about integrating culture into foreign language teaching and some reasons, some approaches to teaching culture.
Key phrases: Sociocultural norms, assumptions, a “facts only” approach, a frame of reference, a culture capsule, culture clusters, intercultural connections, culture assimilations, culture mini-dramas, strategies, techniques.
Nowadays nobody denies the necessity of teaching a language as part of foreign culture and studying the target culture through the language. Research publications on the problem of teaching for cultural understanding have been written by many Ukrainian, Russian, European, and American educators. A number of TESOL and IATEFL publications also deal with a cultural component of language teaching. Why is this so? The reasons for that might be the following:
The problems in the teaching of culture: The teaching of culture has been advocated for many years. But cultural teaching is still unsubstantial and random in most language classrooms. Educators maintain that culture is still the weakest component of most curricula. Some of the reasons for that are the following:
Approaches to teaching culture: Different approaches to teaching for cultural understanding have been designed by researchers, methodologists, and foreign language teachers. Most of them believe that the objectives that are to be achieved in cross-cultural understanding involve processes rather than facts. “Facts are meaningless until interpreted within a problem-solving context”. The goal of the “facts only” approach is just to collect bits of information. This approach seems to be ineffective for several reasons.
Firstly, facts are in a state of continual change, they are not settled, especially when they relate to current life-style. Specific data may not be true across time.
Secondly, a “facts only” approach to culture may establish stereotypes rather than decrease them. This approach does not give us an explanation or reason for cultural variation.
Thirdly, gathering facts in great amounts leave students unprepared when they face cultural situations not previously studied.
Students often approach target-culture phenomena assuming that the new patterns of behavior can be understood within the framework of their own native culture. When cultural phenomena differ from what they expect, students may react negatively, characterizing the target culture as “strange” or “weird” or even not acceptable. An American linguist, Corinne Mantle-Bromley, compares the assumption of equivalence between cultural systems to a similar assumption of equivalence between linguistic systems.
According to the latter assumption, for every word in the mother tongue there is an exact equivalent in the target language. By the way, this is what many people who don’t speak any foreign language assume. Those who believe this assumption think that in order to speak a foreign language one simply substitutes foreign language words for native language words, using the same syntactic pattern and the same word order.
Professor Vicki Galloway, the 2002 recipient of the international Nelson Brooks Award for the Teaching of Culture, stressed the importance of recognizing the dangers of projecting one’s native frame of reference on that of the culture being studied.
She said that to understand another culture, one must construct “a new frame of reference in terms of the people who created it”. She also explained that the process of constructing an appropriate frame of reference is complicated by the fact that cultures have functions and forms. By functions she meant needs, purposes, meanings; by forms – manifestations, realizations, operations. Both functions and forms vary very much, not only across cultures but also within the subcultures of a society. For example, a function such as the need for shelter or accommodation is universal. But the ways in which that need is defined, prioritized, and met in different societies can be diverse.
How can we then help students construct a new frame of reference based in the target culture? Galloway recommends that students begin with an understanding of their own frame of reference, and then, with teacher guidance, explore the target culture through authentic texts and materials.
Suggestions for achieving the integration of culture into foreign language teaching: The suggestions are the following:
Techniques for Teaching Culture: A culture capsule is a short description – one or two paragraphs in length – of one minimal difference between a British and a target-culture custom, accompanied by pictures, photos, slides, or objects. In the classroom students can perform role-plays based on the capsule.
Culture assimilators may consist of as many as 10 to 100 “critical incidents” or episodes that take place between a British and a member of the target culture in which some type of conflict or misunderstanding develops. The source of conflict on the part of the British is the lack of an appropriate cultural framework for understanding the incident.
Culture mini-dramas can be constructed from three to five episodes in which a cultural conflict occurs. As each episode is experienced, students try to explain what the source of the miscommunication is through class discussion, led by the teacher.
After each episode in the series, more cultural information is given, but not enough to understand the cause of the problem, which only becomes apparent in the last scene. This activity helps students see how they might easily jump to false conclusions about the people in the target culture because they are responding and reacting because of their own ethnocentric biases and perceptions.
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