Encouraging Multicultural Students

Encouraging multicultural students

    In the previous post I shared with you about cultural encounters which can be really meaningful for students when studying another culture. Now, I will tell you a little bit about culture capsules.

Culture capsules are one of the best–established and best–known methods for teaching culture. A culture capsule is essentially a brief description of some aspect of a particular culture; for example, the food eaten in particular place. Besides, it usually includes a comparison with the student's native culture. These small projects usually involve the students carrying out some research, and then presenting the findings orally to the rest of the class. What I like most about this technique is that if you plan it carefully, your students will have the opportunity to learn many different cultural aspects in just one class. For example, I myself used this technique for one assignment of a course in my Master's, Second Language and Target Culture. The assignment consisted of planning a cultural class and then teaching it, and it also involved peer observation. So, for my culturally planning, I chose to plan a project for my class about one of the topics we were studying “ Food.” For this topic I usually taught vocabulary related to food like vegetables, groceries, fruits, dairy products, etc, and grammar about countable and uncountable nouns; however, this time I included the “culture capsules project” and it really made my class much more interesting and enjoyable.

Basically, For this project , the students had the follow the following guidelines:

1. Work in small groups, three persons each.
2. Choose a country, and research about the food most commonly eaten by its inhabitants.
3. Prepare a power point presentation in which they explained the underlying factors why people eat those foods.
4. Choose a particular dish, and bring it to class to share it with their classmates.

At first, they were kind of surprised about the project, but then they got really excited, and when the day of the presentation came, they really had fun and learn a lot. They presented about four countries: China, France, Italy and Mexico, and they all enjoy the presentations, especially when they started sharing the food they had brought!

Besides, when I asked them about how they had like the activity, they all agreed that it was very interesting learning about the food from other countries. They also mentioned that it was much better than just studying vocabulary and grammar.

So, as you can see it is not so difficult to encourage students to learn about other cultures.

Marvin Mendez B

EFL Professors

Universidad Nacional

Costa Rica.