Cultural Awareness
Fear of ‘foreignness’ is a feature of some British classrooms. Though pupils will often join in, very cooperatively, with the act of Language learning, once it comes to testing out new found knowledge and communicating with others who speak the language, shyness can creep in, particularly in the secondary classroom. But learning is not only about assimilating the rules of a grammatical system and rehearsing possible future encounters. The process is far more complex and far more interesting than that, because language cannot be separated from the culture to which it belongs.
The readings in this section focus on ways of opening up the classroom to outside influence. They will give you ideas about how to increase your pupils’ curiosity about other people, how to find partners in other countries and what to do once you’ve established such links.
Here are the readings: