A walk in the Garden of Diverse Cultures When Teaching English as a Foreign Language

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Kusumarasdyati .

<p>It is virtually impossible to teach a foreign language without teaching the culture where this language is spoken as a mother tongue because the use of a language relies heavily on the culture observed by the speakers. This principle also applies to the teaching of English in Indonesia, where it is spoken as a foreign language. The present paper aims to describe how the native cultures and the target cultures are explored in a course offered by the English Department of Universitas Negeri Surabaya (State University of Surabaya) in an effort to build understanding across cultures through their similarities and differences. While this may be a tedious task to accomplish due to the multicultural backgrounds of the learners and their diverse experiences that shape their personal opinions, it does not necessarily mean that cross-cultural understanding is impossible to achieve. It should be approached with appropriate methods to ensure that the teaching-learning process can yield the desired results. In addition, learners are engaged in a variety of motivating activities that not only have them examine how their native and target cultures are alike or different, but also give them relevant experiences that can lead to understanding.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong><em>TEFL, foreign language, culture, cross-cultural understanding<strong></strong></em></p>

Author(s):  
SIRANUSH GHAZARYAN

The article touches upon the problems of teaching English as a third foreign language in higher educational institutions of the Republic of Armenia. The students’ mother tongue, in this case, is Armenian. Russian is the first foreign language and French is the second one. Considering the fact that the students’ 2nd (French) and 3rd (English) foreign languages have significant similarities that can cause both positive transfer and negative interference, the teaching/learning process of English should be organized by paying special attention to the similarities and taking into account certain peculiarities. Accordingly, the use of correctly selected exercises can help in organizing the teaching/learning process more quickly and effectively. The author also introduces some “dangerous” language phenomena that may bring about undesirable interference in learning English after French. In addition, a number of exercise samples are provided that might be used to develop the students’ lexical, grammatical and phonological competences in teaching/learning English as a third foreign language.


2021 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 00053
Author(s):  
E.N. Kvasyuk ◽  
O.V. Putistina ◽  
O.V. Savateeva

The importance of correct English pronunciation is growing due to its central role in communication and the speaker’s identity. Non-native English speakers lack a natural linguistic environment and tend to carry articulation rules and intonation from their mother tongue. Modern conditions of the fast-paced world require a revision of the forms and methods of the educational process. Teachers should engage students in independent and individual work at classes, increase the use of practical and research tasks. Information technologies in the teaching process at different levels of education (both school and university) change the roles of all participants in the educational process. Thus, teachers are given more opportunities to improve their work, and students are taught a foreign language at a higher level. The article aims to state the advantages of using multimedia technologies as an educational tool in teaching English practical phonetics and to find out university students’ attitude to it. The object of the research is the benefits of working in a language laboratory, equipped with Rinel-Lingo (a multimedia language programme to train phonetics of a foreign language of university students). The article analyzes the results of the survey conducted in Murmansk arctic state university.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Vincent Mirabile

Abstract To teach English as a second foreign language at university levels provides the educator or professor an excellent occasion to compare the first and second languages by a series of analogical activities that not only highlight the similar forms and structures of them, but more important still, oblige students to comprehend these forms and structures without having either to rely on or depend upon their mother tongue or apprehend them through the prism of their own. In this article are compared Turkish, French and Chinese forms and structures with English through sets of analogical activities that I prepared and applied in classrooms with my Russian students studying the aforesaid languages at the University of Academgorodok near Novosibirsk in Siberia. It was my methodical experiment to bring together English/Turkish, English/French and English/Chinese as interrelated objects of study; to put into relief the interpenetrating analogical elements that these languages possess as a pedagogical approach to them in spite of their very different language families and distinctive structural and morphological features.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Priya K. Nair

In India acquisition of English language is imperative if one wants to sell oneself in the increasingly competitive job market. With a booming population the nation is filled with educated, technologically literate youth. English is not merely a foreign language in India. As India is separated by a plethora of languages knowledge of English is imperative. As the teachers in India are not native speakers of English the language they teach is not free from errors. The articulation is quite problematic as the mother tongue influence is quite pronounced. Technology helps to reduce these errors. Movies as a tool can enhance the listening and speaking skills of our students. It is quite boring to work with disembodied voices and the recorded conversations available in language labs do not sustain the learner’s interest. However learners are often forced to listen to recorded conversations of people they never see, the conversation is often stilted and contemporary idiom is hardly used. However, a completely new dimension to aural practice can be added in the classroom by using movies. <br /><p><strong> </strong></p>


Author(s):  
E. V. Yakovleva ◽  
R. V. Agadzhanyan

The article offers a review of the most important trends in language didactics as revealed by the consistent development of academic thought in the field over the period of 20th-21st centuries. The aforesaid process has laid foundations for modern didactic practices in foreign language teaching, as it addresses media and competence approaches to cross-cultural understanding of functional characteristics, highlighting the new generation didactic materials.


ExELL ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Kaja Mandić ◽  
Izabela Dankić

AbstractThe main objective of this corpus-based study is to research the most frequent two-word collocations in the corpus of nursing scientific articles and compare this newly assembled list of nursing collocations with the Academic Collocation List (ACL). The nursing scientific articles corpus (NSAC) used in this study comprises 1,119,441 words from 262 articles of 10 high-quality journals from the Medical Library Association list which nursing students can freely access. The focus is on noun-noun and noun-adjective collocations. The selected articles were converted into txt files using the ABBYY Fine Reader. WordSmith Tools 7.0 and TermeX were used for noun and collocation extraction. The newly assembled Nursing Collocation List (NCL) and the ACL were compared using Microsoft Excel 2016. A total of 488 collocations were identified in the NSAC and the NCL contains 234 (47.9%) noun + noun and 254 (52.1%) adjective + noun collocation combinations. The most frequent two-word collocation is health care and it appeared 618 times in the NSAC. The ACL (2,469) and the NCL (488) share 123 two-word collocations. Although there are some correspondences between collocations in the two corpora, key nursing collocations with notably higher frequencies are identified in the NSAC (365). Despite the fact that the ACL is the most extensive collocation list across different academic fields and it certainly plays an important role in teaching English as a foreign language, this study suggests that it does not provide key nursing collocations for improvement of nursing collocation competence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 00076
Author(s):  
Mozes Kurniawan

Most area of life requires changes. One of the things changes from time to time is learning method or strategy. In educational sector, especially in Teaching English to Speaker of Other Language (TESOL), teachers are demanded to have creative and innovative ways to teach language other than their own mother tongue in order to maintain pupils’ interest, creativity and learning outcomes. One alternative way to teach English is by integrating technology particularly mobile phone. However, there still questions on what is going on if teachers allow student to access mobile phone during class and how it can be done. This study aims to enrich teachers’ knowledge and broaden the paradigm of using mobile learning method serving the digital native generation in TESOL. A reflective analysis was done in collaboration with literature support to provide a clear image of mobile learning done in English class at a particular study program of Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Indonesia. The result showed that students’ need a transformation of teaching learning process, students can be engaged more actively on learning by using mobile phone and some possible activities are proposed for supporting student-centred instruction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Harni Kartika-Ningsih ◽  
Wawan Gunawan

Genre-based pedagogy has been adapted to the Indonesian national curriculum for subject English since 2004. There has been reports of its success and it now remains as an important part of the language curriculum at schools. However, there is a couple of considerations need to be taken seriously in relation with genre-based adaptation. First, genre-based pedagogy, based on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory, was developed in Australia in English as a mother tongue and ESL classrooms. Indonesian classrooms are different from those in Australia, not least because they teach English as a foreign language. Secondly, the Indonesian curriculum is prescribed from the centre, and though teachers are required to follow the genre-based approach that has been adopted, it is not clear how well teachers have understood it or implemented it. This article aims to discuss critically the recontextualisation of genre-based pedagogy in the EFL classrooms in Indonesia by investigating the ways teachers interpret and implement the teaching of English under the genre-based pedagogy. The study reported here was drawn from an action research project and involved observing one teaching learning unit of the teachers trained to implement the genre-based pedagogy. The findings indicate that the genre-based pedagogy in Indonesian EFL classrooms has been recontextualised only in part, because the influence of other teaching methods tends to prevail. This is problematic to the interest of the national curriculum to improve students’ English literacy. The main goal of genre pedagogy which aims to uphold social justice through equal distribution of knowledge will not prevail if the principles of the pedagogy itself is not recontextualised properly.


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