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Teacher's Guide_Cultural_V1
Oxford Guide to British
and American Culture
Teacher’s Handbook
TEACHER’S HANDBOOK
2
Contents
page
Cultural Materials and Teaching Culture in the Classroom
3
Introduction
3
Culture in the Language Classroom
3
Oxford Guide to British and American Culture
5
Classroom Activities
7
Task sheets and questionnaires
7
Reading activities
8
Listening activities
11
Oral presentations
12
Project work
13
Writing activities
13
Games
13
Sample lesson plan
15
© OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD GUIDE TO BRITISH AND AMERICAN CULTURE
3
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
© OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
TEACHER’S HANDBOOK
4
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 UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD GUIDE TO BRITISH AND AMERICAN CULTURE
5
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.
3
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.
© OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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