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quality of life
the level of enjoyment, comfort and health in someone's life
My quality of life has improved tremendously since I moved to the country.
Lesson 18 Designing materials for teaching intercultural issues (triangle AIM: language, pedagogy, culture)
Handout 1
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.
—— Mahatma Gandhi
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I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.
—— Mahatma Gandhi
Handout 1 b
Integration of culture into language teaching
A language has a communicative function. The success of this process much depends how the speaker uses his background knowledge. We should underline the importance of the speakers’ cultural awareness, the factors that support the communication, how language and culture correspond among themselves, how language reflects the world through consciousness of the person, how the individual and collective mentality, ideology and culture are reflected in the language, how language and culture create a world picture - primary, from the native language, and secondary, acquired when studying foreign languages. The maintenance of a cultural and national connotation of idioms is interpretation of the figurative basis of idiomatic picture of the world in the sign of cultural and national "space" of this language community. From this point of view it is possible to deduce methodologically important consequences: the cultural knowledge can be "caught" from an internal form of the idiom: there are some "traces" of the cultures, customs and traditions, historical events and life elements and the culture can be understood as a way of orientation of the subject in empirical, cultural, spiritual life on the basis of norms, standards, stereotypes, symbols, myths, etc. signs of the national culture which has been traditionally established in certain national language society. So a custom is the usual way of behaving or acting. And a tradition is a custom, opinion or belief handed down from one generation to another, often orally or by practice.
Foreign language teaching is seen as comprising not only linguistic performance and verbal communication, but also such abilities as intercultural consciousness and intercultural skills. It is a well-known and accepted fact that linguistic skills and cultural issues are inseparable and should be handled together in language learning and teaching. It is obvious that if a teacher wants to maximize students’ communicative effectiveness when interacting with members of other cultures, the students should also be provided with intercultural awareness training as an integral part of their English courses. At this point, English teachers have lots of responsibilities to design their course and develop materials to promote students’ intercultural communicative competence.
These days there are many ways and conditions of teaching and learning a foreign language. These among others include individual or group learning with or without an instructor. Irrespective of the method one uses during the teaching and learning process in a second language, the cultural aspect of the language and studies of the cultures that use the language should be included. Through these, learners can understand that there are different people, languages and cultures in the world and may better appreciate those differences.
As has been shown, teaching culture as part of teaching foreign language is very important and the dynamic nature of culture should not be lost in the process. In classrooms the native culture of the students and their cultural differences should be known and respected by teachers. It helps all participants to pick up the foreign language and its culture as well. If the socio-cultural competence of the learner is well established and developed during the language teaching process, one can be almost equal with the native speakers in the cultural aspects. But at the same time it should be noted that, although etiquette as part of culture is fixed the norms are always changing. Finally, the main aim of foreign language teaching and learning is to communicate, to understand and to be understood. To achieve these objectives, the teaching of customs plays a major role.
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