The target culture and students’ own culture are inseparable in the process of language learning and communicating because we compare and find similarities and try to understand the differences or the culture uniqueness.
There are different definitions of culture. An American journalist, Walter Lippmann, said: “Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.”
So, what are the ways of teaching culture? We can teach culture by itself or incorporate it implicitly within the language tasks we offer our students.
1. For students in a multi-national classroom, it is great to make a scrapbook, an album or a poster representing nationalities in the classroom about traditions or people they admire in their nation.
2. You may want to arrange the festival of national dishes, where the students could bring something they cook themselves and present the dishes in English. The dishes might be complemented with the recipes.
3. Often students are deeply interested in some other cultures. They can share what they know about those ones. Students can make a poster “Amazing Facts about .... Culture.”
4. You can go further and create a bank of interesting facts about different cultures to reflect the best works in Literature, the greatest people in history, science, Literature or Art. You could set a certain number of reasons to be proud of some certain culture – for example, 10, 20 or 30 reasons to be proud of Russian/ American/ Irish/ ... culture.
5. Another wonderful thing to do is to bring cultural artifacts into the classroom to tell the class about them. You might first want to let students work in groups speculating about where the objects are from, how they could be used and what for.
6. There is a wide variety of games and quizzes to make learning about culture more entertaining. These ones could be bought in book stores, downloaded from educational websites or developed by the teacher. They can include information about the history, landmarks, inventions, famous people or festivals and celebrations.
7. The experience of arranging round tables and discussions with native speakers is priceless. Much can be learnt about the culture first hand.
8. The best way to teach culture is to involve students in international projects. Find a partner anywhere in the world and match your students in pairs or groups so that they could explore their own and learn more about other cultures.
Explore your own culture and create the ABC of your town, the ABC of your region, the ABC of your country. Step beyond and make the ABC of the world
The World of Superstitions project can show you ways in which we are similar or different believing some certain things.
Travelling Buddies – a project in which you swap over toys or paper dolls with your international partners to keep a diary and write down notes about where they were, what they saw, what they were doing or wearing, eating, etc.
The Peace Tree. Join in projects with one or more schools from different countries to share the symbols of different nationalities, including traditional and religious symbols.
The Global Project. Connect foreign students with yours so they could learn about each other and make a product to demonstrate what they have consequently learnt about their partners.
9. The magic world of fairy-tales shows that the target language culture and our own culture have similar magic things, such as the magic or the flying carpet, the apples of youth, the water of life, the magic table-cloth, the magic mirror and the seven-league boots. Along with these common things, we have some that are typical of ours only. These are the 7-coloured flower, the magic goldfish, the magic flute and the invisible cap.
Questions to ask students:
How could these magic things be used in our lives?
What would you do/ where would you go if you had ... ?
Which three of these things would you choose and why?
For their homework they might be asked to do a short-term project answering the questions - What magic things do you have your culture? What magic things are there in other cultures?
To sum up, teaching culture enriches our students’ experience and lets them appreciate cultural diversity. Analysing the target culture along with the students’ own culture can help overcome stereotypes, bring different cultures closer together and foster better understanding.