Cultural Encounters

Cultural Encounters

Teaching Culture in our EFL classroom! How? That's the question many educators have when they are told that culture should be also taught. I myself had the same question, and usually wondered how to include cultural topics in my conversational English class. Besides, I always claimed that I did not have enough time to teach culture because there was too much grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary that I needed to cover in a certain period of time. However, now I think it's not that difficult, and in fact, culture can boost student's learning process. This is because by teaching culture, educators can make their classes more dynamic, interesting, and enjoyable for students.

There are lots of strategies professors can use to teach something about the target culture, USA culture in our case, or about any other culture around the world. In future posts, I will be sharing with you some of the strategies that you can use to start promoting not only bilingual students but and multicultural students. In this particular post, I want to share with you about one activity which I consider to be the most powerful and meaningful for students, multicultural encounters.

I myself had the pleasure of experiencing it. Some weeks ago, I had the opportunity to share with three guest speakers during a class in one of my Master's courses. One of the speakers was from Texas, USA, and she shared with us many aspects about Texas's culture and her particular culture. The other two speakers were from Germany, and they shared some particular aspects of Germany Culture as well.

It's wonderful how much you can learn about a culture when you have the opportunity to engage in a conversation with a person from that culture. Sometimes, when we are researching about a culture in books or the Internet, there are certain peculiarities that even we professors cannot fully understand since we are still outsiders to that culture. That's when we see how useful and rewarding can a cultural encounter be since sharing directly with subjects from the culture under study will allow students to have a deeper and more complete understanding. That's why I really encourage you to plan this kind of activities for your classes, I can assure you that your students will really love it.

Marvin Mendez

EFL Professor

Universidad Nacional