BrE vs AmE(1).pdf

Oxford Guide to British

and American Culture

Teacher’s Handbook

TEACHER’S HANDBOOK

Contents

page

Cultural Materials and Teaching Culture in the Classroom

Introduction

Culture in the Language Classroom

Oxford Guide to British and American Culture

Classroom Activities

Task sheets and questionnaires

Reading activities

Listening activities

Oral presentations

Project work

Writing activities

Games

Sample lesson plan

OXFORD GUIDE TO BRITISH AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Cultural Materials and Teaching Culture

in the Classroom

1 Introduction

Welcome to the Teacher’s Notes for the Oxford Guide to British and American

Culture . These notes have been written for teachers who are interested in

including culture learning activities as part of their English language courses.

Here we aim to provide an introduction to the role of culture in the language

classroom and also put forward some ideas and suggestions on how to integrate

the study of culture into language lessons, along with speciﬁc examples of how

the Oxford Guide to British and American Culture can help in doing this. In the

Classroom Activities section, you will ﬁnd descriptions of a wide variety of

classroom activities and practical ideas on using the Guide as a source of

cultural material.

We have included suggestions for situations in which the teacher alone has

access to a copy of the Guide , as well as situations in which copies of the

Guide are available for use by students. The suggested activities can be

modiﬁed or adapted, depending on your students’ needs and your own teaching

situation or style.

2 Culture in the Language Classroom

Nowadays language teachers are being urged to make culture a part of their

language lessons. More and more learners of English, especially those at the

intermediate and advanced levels, are being offered courses that are directly

concerned with the culture of Britain or the US. These courses vary widely with

respect to what is taught in the name of ‘culture’ and how the cultural

information is presented. Some teachers emphasize ‘ Culture with a big C ’ – the

ﬁne arts, literature and history, institutions, etc. Others emphasize ‘ culture with

a little c ’, focusing on British and American everyday life – the norms, habits

and behaviour of the people in those societies. Some emphasize the patterns of

communication, verbal and non-verbal, which can be observed between

members of these societies – who says what to whom , as well as how , when

and where they say it, and under what circumstances . Still other teachers focus

on the values and attitudes displayed by British and American people.

The study of British and American life and institutions has for a long time been

a traditional part of school curricula in Europe and North America. For this

reason, ‘Culture with a big C’ has beneﬁted from a clearly identiﬁed curriculum

and a wide variety of related teaching materials. On the other hand, the

culturally inﬂuenced behaviour patterns that make up ‘culture with a little c’

have often been treated in an anecdotal or peripheral way, depending largely

on the interest and awareness of teachers and students. The situation is

changing, however, both among general EFL students, who may at some point

expect to work or study in Britain or the US, and in ESL/ESOL classes where

students are already immersed in and trying to integrate into the host culture.

For this reason, among the more recently published language teaching texts and

materials are many that focus on cultural behaviour and the role it plays in

communication. Rather than presenting English in isolation, such materials

TEACHER’S HANDBOOK

encourage students to make and share cross-cultural comparisons and to learn

about British and American behaviour and customs as they practise and

improve their English language skills.

Materials and approach

The areas of culture that you choose to emphasize will of course depend on the

goals and needs of your students. However, no matter what area of culture you

choose to focus on – high art, popular culture, behaviour, or values and

attitudes – learning about culture will be more effective if it is clearly identiﬁed

and systematically treated as a regular feature of the language lesson. The

resources available for teaching culture are many. Besides the Oxford Guide to

British and American Culture , they include regular language course textbooks

(especially those which contain authentic materials for listening and reading),

international television and radio broadcasts, magazines and newspapers, the

wide range of materials available through the Internet, and all kinds of realia

which can be brought into the classroom from a Hershey bar to an iPod.

However, effective use of such materials requires careful planning. Little

cultural awareness will result from merely displaying a cultural artefact in the

classroom, or by simply pointing out that ‘British people do this’ or ‘American

people do that’. Using a task-oriented approach in which students are given

opportunities to interact with or react to elements of the target language culture

and then compare them with the corresponding elements of their own culture

will make a more lasting impression. Such a task-oriented, cross-cultural

approach is characterized by learning activities in which students:

■

Work together in pairs or small groups to gather precise bits of information;

■

Share and discuss what they have discovered in order to form a more

complete picture;

■

Interpret the information within the context of British or American culture

and in contrast with their own culture.

Experiencing culture

Getting students actively involved in experiencing or interacting with some

aspect of culture will also make the learning process more effective. This

‘experiential stage’ need not be very long. Relatively short experiences in which

students come up with manageable amounts of data will make it easier to keep

discussions on track. Experiences may be varied. They include interactive group

tasks in which students work together and do something with some pieces of

realia (e.g. examine a group of British cartoons and group them according to

the subject matter of the humour, or study a group of US postage stamps and

draw up a list of things they reveal about the country and its people), but they

also include tasks that can be carried out individually (e.g. listening to a lecture,

reading a magazine article, completing a questionnaire, or writing a report).

Any of these culturally related experiences can serve as a starting point as long

as students are given a chance to react to and reﬂect on the material at some

point.

Processing the experience

Processing the experience is as important as the experience itself, and

discussion is a primary component of the processing stage. Once students have

had a chance to react to and reﬂect on the experience, they get together in

OXFORD GUIDE TO BRITISH AND AMERICAN CULTURE

groups to share and talk about what they have discovered. Questions of the

following type may be helpful at this point:

What did you learn about British/American culture from this experience?

What did you learn about your own culture?

What did you learn about yourself?

What other things might this experience relate to?

Whether using the type of activities described here or those from a coursebook,

the educational goal is to provide students with a culture learning experience.

Because so much cultural input is perceived on a subconscious level, conscious

examination of cultural events or thoughtful reﬂection on one’s own behaviour

and values does not always come naturally. We need to structure lessons for

such deliberate culture learning and self-reﬂection to take place. By carefully

choosing and planning classroom activities so that they proceed from

experience through the processing phases, culture learning is more likely to

take place.

Oxford Guide to British and American Culture

The Oxford Guide to British and American Culture is an illustrated reference

book that has been designed as a resource for both students and teachers of

English in the upper secondary school, at university or in adult education. The

book presents alphabetically organized information on all aspects of life in

Britain and the US, including the social and cultural connotations which many

of the items have for British and American people. For ease of understanding,

the Guide has been written within a restricted vocabulary.

How can the Guide help teachers?

The Guide is a wide-ranging collection of useful and interesting cultural

information for both students and teachers of English. Besides serving as a

reference book on all aspects of British and American culture, the book is useful

as a resource for developing teaching material. At some time or other, most

teachers attempt to develop material of their own – to supplement a

coursebook, to expand upon some point, to replace or update inadequate

material, or to develop a complete curriculum from scratch. For teachers who

want to develop culturally based teaching material, the Guide serves as a

comprehensive one-volume reference work.

In the Classroom Activities section we have given numerous examples of

classroom activities that use material from the Guide , either as a starting point

for a lesson or as a means of expanding lesson content.

How can the Guide help students?

The Guide will be especially helpful to upper-intermediate and advanced

students of English who are in need of guidance or background information on

aspects of culture that they come across in their language lessons, in their

reading, on the Internet, etc. The Guide will also be useful as a source of

information for culture-based classroom projects. Many students will enjoy

simply browsing through the book at random, reading any articles that catch

their attention. Others will want to use the book to look up and read about

topics that are of personal interest to them.

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