How To Personalize Culture

If you’re familiar with materials from National Geographic Learning you’ll know that they include a lot of images, texts and topics about people and places from different countries. For this reason, you can often exploit the cross-cultural aspects of the material and help your students build their intercultural awareness alongside their language learning.

When thinking about how to approach culture in the classroom, it’s worth noting an observation made by the social psychologist Peter Adler on the subject of learning about culture and intercultural communication: [It] ‘begins as a journey into another culture and ends as a journey into one’s own culture.’ (Adler, 1975). So when you introduce the topic of another culture into a lesson, use it as an opportunity for students to reflect on their own culture – in other words, to personalize it. Let’s explore this at a practical level by categorizing culture in ways: objects, behavior and ideas (Robinson, 1985).

Objects

Showing symbols and objects of a culture is often the easiest way into the topic of cultural differences. The drawback is that it can also result in narrow stereotyping; for example, showing student a British man wearing a bowler hat suggests that every male in Britain still wears them. On the other hand, the idea of cultural stereotypes can also provide an interesting route into the lesson. For example, show these five hats to your students and ask them to discuss these questions:

• Which countries do you associate these hats with?
• What types of objects are often used to represent your country?
• Do you think these kinds of representations are positive or negative? Why?

Challenging cultural perceptions in this way can be highly generative for classroom discussion and cultural awareness; in fact, at the end of this blog post you can see that these images accompany a reading text (from Life Intermediate Second Edition) called, ‘How we see other cultures’ which looks at the way we automatically form opinions of other cultural groups through objects.

Behaviour

The topic of behaviour – or the way we do things – is naturally suited to the language classroom as a topic because if you have students who are learning English for travel or work then they will come into contact with people from various different cultures. Whilst they might discover that they communicate with the universal language of English, they will also find that their behavior can differ greatly. You could use quizzes like the extract shown below where students have to guess answers about social behavior in different countries.

1 Bangkok Don’t forget to remove your __________ when you visit someone’s house. A. shoes            B. socks             C. belt 2 Rio When you arrive for dinner, you greet your host by ____________. A. kissing one cheek      B. kissing both cheeks    C. kissing their hand 3 USA At a restaurant, you normally tip the waiter __________ . A. 5-9%             B. 10-14%         C. 15-20%

As with ‘objects’, there is a danger that this kind of quiz suggests all people in one country all behave the same way so always be open to students disagreeing with such a quiz. Furthermore, let students personalize the content by having them write three pieces of advice for a visitor to their country or culture. Scaffold this activity on the board by writing these sentences for giving advice and student complete them in their own words (or alternatively creating their own culture quiz):

1 Don’t forget to ….when you visit someone’s house.

2 When you arrive for dinner, you greet your host by….

3 At a restaurant, you normally tip the waiter…

Ideas

This final aspect of culture is more abstract than the previous two categories because it involves thinking about our values and cultural associations. However, it’s the very ambiguity of ‘cultural ideas’ as a topic which can make it engaging for students.

Here’s an activity based around a listening text in a course book on the subject of culture and colors. Write the colors red, yellow, orange, blue, green on the board. Ask the class what the color ‘red’ can represent or symbolize in their culture. Answers may vary and include stop, danger, anger, love, luck, wealth and even bravery. Then put students into groups and have them discuss the meaning of the other colors in their own culture. Finally show them this summary table for comparison:

Culture and colors

Color	Place	Meaning
Red	Western cultures Easter cultures	Love, anger Luck, bravery
Yellow	India China	Knowledge Power
Orange	Japan	Happiness
Blue	Mexico	Death
Green	International England	Environmentalism Envy, jealousy

(Adapted from Life Intermediate Unit 1)

And if any of your students are from these countries and start disagreeing with what’s written in the table – that’s fine, culture is personal!

 

References

Adler, P. S. (1975) “The transitional experience: An alternative view of culture shock,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 15, 13-23.

Robinson, G. (1985) Cross cultural Understanding Prentice Hall 1985

Text taken from Life Intermediate Second Edition Unit 1: