NGHE AN DEPARTMENT OF TRAINING AND EDUCATION NAM DAN 1 UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHING EXPRIENCES TOPIC: Treatment of cross-cultural characteristics in the teaching of speaking skill to grade 12A2 students of English in Nam Dan 1 upper secondary school. Teacher: Hồ Thị Mỹ Hạnh Group: Xã Hội 1 Tel: 0986987872 Nam Dan 2021 1 skkn PART A: INTRODUCTION TABLE OF CONTENT PART A. Aims of the study…………………. Scope of the study……………………………………………………….
Methods of the study……………………………………………………. Literature review…………………………………………………3 Chapter 2: The study………………………………………………………. THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE METHODS 1. The result of the study…………………………………………….
The effectiveness of the study……………. CONCLUSION REFERENCES APPENDIX 1 APPENDIX 2 APPENDIX 3 2 skkn PART A. Rationale English, the most popular foreign language in Vietnam, has been taught from the early age (at the age of six or even younger) in most of schools throughout the country as a compulsory subject. Thus, many Vietnamese, especially the young people, can speak English; however; not many of them have intelligible cultural knowledge.
Personally, I think that cultural gaps are one of the most important keys lead us to success in communicating genuinely and understanding the real world outside the classroom. In order to use the language effectively, language teachers should realize that knowledge of the world's language and culture is increasingly important. Language learners need to have mastery of not only the language itself but also the culture in which the language is used. Therefore, it is suggested that language teachers should focus on the integration of culture in language classroom, which serves as a tool for helping students understand and appreciate other cultures.
Nowadays, in teaching and learning English as a foreign language in Vietnam, speaking has received a great deal of attention. Nonetheless, English is learnt and taught in a non-native environment, students usually do not have close contact with native speakers of English and have little opportunity to discover how these speakers think, feel, and interact with others. That is the reason why they do not feel confident enough to converse with English teachers or native speakers and people in other countries where English is used mainly. It proves everything clearly that culture and language can not be separated and the teaching and learning of a foreign language should always be a culture- based course.
So as to improve student's communicative competence, teacher should insert cross- cultural knowledge into the learning and teaching of speaking skills. From my teaching experience, cultural challenges in speaking-class have become a great source of inspiration for my thesis, which deals with the problem: "Treatment of cross-cultural characteristics in the teaching of speaking skill to grade 12A1 students of English. This study is, hence, to aim at treating cross- cultural characteristics into teaching of speaking in English for the teacher and students at Nam Dan I high school. The major aims of the study are as follows: - To investigate the teachers' and students' attitudes towards the importance of cross- cultural knowledge to the learning of a foreign language.
- To find out the attitudes of teachers and students at Nam Dan 1 high school toward the importance of culture in learning speaking skills in English language teaching. 3 skkn - To find out the effective ways of treatment cross-cultural characteristics into teaching of speaking skill in English. Aims of the study The major aims of the study are as follows: - To investigate the teachers' and students' attitudes towards the importance of cross- cultural knowledge to the learning of a foreign language. - To find out the attitudes of teachers and students at Nam Dan 1 high school toward the importance of culture in learning speaking skills in English language teaching.
- To find out the effective ways of treatment cross-cultural characteristics into teaching of speaking in English. Scope of the study To develop speaking skill and the communicative competence for students at Nam Dan I high school, teachers has made a lot of effort to motivate the students to participate in speaking class effectively. However, in the thesis, the researcher wants to find out the attitudes, as well as the cross-culture awareness in teaching and learning spoken English. The scope of this study is limited to the raising of students' cross-cultural awareness through speaking only.
The subjects of the study are grade 12A2 students of English at Nam Dan I high school in Nghe An province. The suggestions and recommendations are all centered on a combination of task-based of activity- based syllabuses. Methods of the study Because the purpose of this study is to investigate the teachers` and students` perception of the role of cultural understanding in learning English, a questionnaire was used as the key instrument of data collection. Data were analysised quantitatively by means of descriptive statistics.
The importance of cross- cultural knowledge in foreign language learning 1. What is cross-culture? Cross-culture can be seen as cultures in contact or cultures encounters. The term "cross-culture" usually refers to the meeting of two cultures or languages across the political boundaries of nation-states ( Claire Kramsch). They are predicated on the equivalence of one nation-one culture-one language.
In foreign language, teaching a cross-cultural approach seeks ways to understand the other on 4 skkn the other side of the border by learning his or her national language. Cross-cultural communication does not only study cultural differences and their influences on the people's behaviors but also see the similarities between them. Effective cross-cultural communication is concerned with overcoming cultural differences across nationality, religion, borders, culture and behavior. Cross-cultural communication competency can only be truly achieved through cross cultural awareness training, language acquisition, foreign travel and cultural immersion.
Cross-cultural understanding refers to the basic ability of people to recognize, interpret and correctly react to people, incidences or situations that are open to misunderstanding due to cultural differences. It is said that cross-culture understanding is recognition of the ways in which two cultures resemble one another as well as the ways in which they differ. Mastering cross-culture knowledge opens great vista for the teacher and provides a basis for better understanding of persons from other backgrounds, as well as supplying new insights into approaches to teaching a second language. According to Meyer (cited in Eli Hinkel;1991:37), intercultural competence has been defined in foreign language learning as "the ability of a person to behave adequately in a flexible manner when confronted with actions, attitudes, and expectations of representatives of foreign cultures".
The relationship between language and culture. Culture, unlike language, does not consist of specific rules that apply to all people in one culture. Nevertheless, Culture and language have a close relationship. Many linguists have been discussed a question for a long time: how do the language and culture relate to each other? One of the most well known sources is Sapir-Whorf's hypothesis (cited in Pinker 1994:59) state: "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts and as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way.
an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory." Pinker shows that Whorf did not do his research properly to prove his hypothesis. However, it cannot be denied that language and culture are profoundly connected, or rather, that language is inseparable from culture. According to Claire Kramch (1998:3) "They give meaning to it through the medium they choose to communicate with one another, for example on the telephone or face to face, writing a letter or sending an e-mail message, reading the newspaper or interpreting a graph or chart.
The way in which people use the spoken, written, or visual medium itself to creates meanings that are understandable to the group they belong to, for example, through a speaker's tone of voice, accent, conversation style, gestures and facial expressions." Through 5 skkn Clair Kramch's idea, we find that language embodies cultural reality. As Nguyen Van Do (2006) has said: "Language and culture can be seen as the faces of a sheet of paper". Language cannot exist outside the social context, language is a social institution. Buttjes (1990:55) points out the reason why language and culture are inseparably connected that: 1- Language acquisition does not follow a universal sequence, but differs across cultures; 2- The process of becoming a competent member of society is realized through exchanges of language in particular social situations; 3- Every society orchestrates the ways in which children participate in particular situations, and this, in turn, affects the form, the function and the content of children's utterances; 4- Caregivers' primary concern is not with grammatical input, but with the transmission of sociocultural knowledge; 5- The native learner, in addition to language, acquires also the paralinguistic patterns and the kinesics of his or her culture.
Language reflects culture. Culture affects the way language is expressed and language may contain many factors of culture in turn. Words always reflect attached cultural elements that are practiced by the people who speak the language. All the belief, value, attitudes, perception.
are performed and transmitted via language. Language cannot be explained without reference to its cultural context. Language is acquired in a cultural-social context and the meaning constructed are the result of interaction between individual, the language and the culture. Therefore, while teaching language, it is necessary for teachers to introduce cultural element.
Goals and objectives for treatment of cross-cultural characteristics in English teaching. From linguist's ideas and analysis about the relationship of language and culture, we can see that teaching culture needs to be integrated in the curriculum of the foreign language. Teachers do indeed need to teach students a few critical skills that can help them develop and improve the quality of their intercultural communication that can help them "get their feet wet in the waters of another culture. Here are some goals, devised by Seelye in 1974 and refined in 1993, that will help teachers select cultural data that will increase student skill in intercultural communication: Goal 1: Interest- The student demonstrates curiosity about the target culture and empathy toward its people.
6 skkn Goal 2: Who- The student recognizes that role expectations and other social variables such as age, sex, social class, ethnicity, and place of residence affect the way people speak and behave. Goal 3: What- The student realizes that effective communication requires discovering the culturally conditioned images that are evoked in the minds of people when they think, act, and react to the world around them. Goal 4: Where and When- The student recognizes that situational variables and convention shape behavior in important ways. (S/he needs to know how people in the target culture act in common mundane and crisis situations) Goal 5: Why- The student understands that people generally act the way they do because they are using options society allows for satisfying basic physical and psychological needs, and that cultural patterns are interrelated and tend mutually to support need satisfaction.
Goal 6: Exploration- The student can evaluate a generalization about the target culture in terms of the amount of evidence substantiating it, and has the skills needed to locate and organize information about the target culture from the library, the mass media, people, and personal observation. The Nostrands (1970) listed nine objectives: students should have the ability to 1) React appropriately in asocial situation 2) Describe a pattern in the culture 3) Recognize a pattern when it is illustrated 4) “Explain” a pattern 5) Predict how a pattern is likely to apply in a given situation 6) Describe or manifest an attitude important for making oneself acceptable in the foreign society. 7) Evaluate the form of a statement concerning a culture pattern 8) Describe/demonstrate defensible methods of analyzing a socio-cultural whole 9) Identify basic human purposes that make significant the understanding that is being taught Various versions of these steps have been made, with more or less the same goals and expectations for students.