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CHAPTER THREE
METHODOLOGY
This chapter describes a twenty-week case study on teaching culture in an elementary EFL classroom. The first section explains the rationale for the research design. The second section depicts the instructional context and participants. The third section presents a pilot study conducted in the previous term. In addition, the fourth section introduces the procedures of the cultural project. The fifth section states the instruments while the sixth section describes the procedures of data collection and data analysis.
A Case Study Research Design
The current research emphasized both the importance of learning processes and intercultural learning outcomes in an EFL instructional setting. A cultural project was implemented in the English classroom to promote students’ intercultural learning.
Since the previous studies on EFL students’ intercultural learning were mostly conducted in the secondary and university levels, this study was conducted in an elementary school in Taiwan with the employment of a case study design. The purpose of utilizing a case study approach was to get an in-depth and holistic
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understanding of students’ learning process regarding their development of intercultural competence (Yin, 2003).
The instructor was the researcher. This dual role arrangement had several advantages. One advantage was that the teacher has already developed a close relationship with the participants, which may facilitate the implementation of new teaching approach. Another possible advantage of teacher being a researcher had to do with the teacher’s familiarity with the existing curriculum, which tended to make the themes and the procedures of the cultural project more easily connected to the content of students’ English textbooks.
The Instructional Context
This research was conducted in an elementary school in Southern Taiwan, which prioritized and placed heavy emphasis on English education. The cultural case study was conducted in the courses offered by the English Village established by Ministry of Education, which has been operated at this school location since 2013. Two foreign English teachers were recruited by the local government to help operate the program.
In addition to foreign teachers, other teaching resources such as technological equipment including tablets were also available. Because of the success of the program, the school was assigned by the Ministry of Education to become a mentor school to coach and lead other schools on applying technology into their curriculum.
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As for the English courses in this school, in the beginning of the semester, the two foreign English teachers collaborated with Taiwanese English teachers to design the curriculum and lesson plans. Starting from the third grade, students at this school had three English classes per week. Two classes were taught based on the textbook curriculum and one specifically aimed for conducting cultural lessons.
In this study, based on the school-based cultural curriculum, the teaching team decided to focus on Australian culture because Jeff (pseudonym) was the new foreign teacher in this school. The main goal of this cultural project was to let students to know the Australian culture as well as to get familiar with their new foreign teacher.
The cultural project implemented in this study was designed by the school English teaching team including three Taiwanese English teachers and one foreign English foreign teacher from Australia. All of them have had some experiences in teaching culture in their English classes. Each teacher on the team played different role in the cultural project. The researcher was also the English teacher Susan
(pseudonym), who was the cultural project leader and conducted the first three lessons in the project; the foreign teacher, Jeff (pseudonym) from Australia, was responsible for providing feedback on both the language and cultural content of the lesson plans and was also invited to deliver the last lesson in the project. As for the other two Chinese teachers, Penny (also pseudonym), who had three years co-teaching
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experiences with foreign English teachers, were the homeroom teacher of the participating students. She observed the class and gave suggestions about the lesson plans. Another Chinese teacher, Ann (also pseudonym), helped brainstorm ideas about the cultural lessons.
The Participants
The participants in this case study were twenty-two fourth graders in the same class from the school. Eleven of them were male and eleven of them were female. All participants were provided with the consent forms, which explained the purpose of the study. All the forms were signed by the students’ guardians. (See Appendix A for the consent form). Regarding the participants’ prior cultural learning experiences, nine of them have had previous exposure and experiences to participate in cultural lessons. In contrast, eleven of them did not have any prior exposure or experiences with cultural lessons. On average, the participants’ years of learning English were two and a half years. Moreover, three students have learned Japanese and one has learned
Vietnamese. In terms of their cross-cultural experiences, eleven participants have never had any cultural engagements or interactions with foreigners. However, eleven participants have had cross cultural learning experiences. Among them, four of them have been abroad. In addition, one participant’s family was from Vietnam. Regarding their experience with learning through cultural projects, none of the participants have
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engaged in this kind of learning experience before. To ensure anonymity, all participants of this study were given pseudonyms.
A Pilot Study for a Cultural Lesson on St. Patrick’s Day
To prepare for the cultural course content, the researcher conducted a pilot study on the cultural topic of St. Patrick’s Day in the in the spring of 2018. It consisted of three lessons.
The participants were the same group of students in this research. Students were interviewed in the study. The reasons to choose St. Patrick Day as the pilot lessons were as follows: first, since most of the holiday teaching in Taiwan English
classrooms focused on celebrating Easter, Halloween and Christmas, fewer students in Taiwan knew about the festival of St. Patrick day. Second, unlike the previous studies, the instructor of this study intended to demonstrate both big C culture (i.e.
wearing a green costume, making a lucky charm and finding a Leprechaun) as well as the small C culture (i.e. the non-verbal language symbols) through the cultural
lessons. For instance, students learned that people can pinch you if you forget to wear something green on St. Patrick Day.
In the first lesson, the instructor introduced the history and background of St Patrick’s Day as well as taught the vocabulary and its symbolic meanings. In the following week, the homeroom teacher held an activity called, “Finding the
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Leprechaun.” Students received a golden chocolate when they found the Leprechaun.
In the second lesson, the instructor led students to engage in a kinesthetic experience of making Lucky charms. In the third lesson, the conductor used thinking maps to lead students to compare their own culture and the target culture. Before the lesson began, the instructor interviewed students about their prior knowledge. Among the twenty-two participating students, only four had heard about St. Patrick’s Day. Two of them were already informed about it when they were in kindergarten; their teachers asked them to wear something green on March 17th. Two of them had heard about it from a cartoon TV channel. The pilot study had a significant impact on the
researcher’s understanding of curriculum design regarding the various aspects of the cultural project.
Several implications were drawn from the researcher’s pilot experience, which served as basis to modify the design of the formal study. First, the instructor could offer certain scaffolding strategies that help link the content with students’ experience or activate relevant background knowledge. For example, instead of teaching students about St. Patrick’s Day’s religious background, the instructor may provide an
interconnected schema such as a story or a real object like a world map prior to the instruction to arouse their motivation. Second, the instructor could provide word banks or prompts to help students to help students’ archive the working activities.
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Third, the instructor also needed to take language difficulties of the students into consideration. For instance, when writing the reflection journal, students generally found it difficult to understand the task and to deal with these problems; the instructor could provide some Chinese explanation for the complex content such as historical facts. Fourth, concerning the interview procedure, since these were younger learners, some participants might feel anxious when they talked to the interviewee on their own. Group interviews could be a better option than individual interviews.
Procedure of Implementing the Cultural Project
The cultural project was 20-week long and consisted of four cultural lessons implemented during the semester. At the end of each lesson, students’ worksheets completed during the class were collected to document their intercultural learning. In addition, students’ performance on worksheets was also served as the basis for modifying the next lesson. Finally, after the last lesson, group interviews were conducted to gain better understanding of students’ perceptions of the project (see Figure 1 below).
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Figure 1. Procedure of the study
Data collection
Lesson One: An Introduction to Culture
Adjusting teaching content of the second lesson based on data collection of the first lesson
Group interviews Data analysis
Lesson Four: Cross-cultural communication
Adjusting teaching content of the fourth lesson based on data collection of the third lesson Data collection
Lesson Three: The Double Bubble Thinking Map Data collection
Lesson Two: Australia Facts
Adjusting teaching content of the third lesson based on data collection of the second
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Teaching Material
This section describes the content of the teaching material used for the four cultural lessons. The first lesson used a self-designed teaching worksheet called, “What is Culture?” (Appendix B), which was adapted from a website (Education.com) to teach students about culture. There are two reasons to utilize the worksheet in the lesson;
First, the content of the worksheet helped students learn the different aspects of culture. Secondly, the format of the worksheet was simple and suitable for the age of the target students. After the students got familiar with the concept of culture, the instructor introduced the storybook, “Same Same but Different,” written by Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw. It is a renowned story to be used for teaching students about cultural differences. The story encourages students to explore each other’s differences in a positive way. After telling the story, the instructor encouraged her students to make a personal connection with their Australian teacher by imitating the story line from the books. Furthermore, students were divided into three groups. Each student chose one topic and illustrated what were the differences and similarities between Taiwanese culture and Australian culture.
In the second lesson, Australia Facts, the instructor adopted a leveled book from the website called Reading A to Z. Leveled books are designed specifically for language learning and for matching the English levels of young learners. The book,
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“Are you from Australia?”, was selected for delivering some facts about animals in Australia. It portrays the special animals in Australia with colorful and detailed photographs to help readers imagine what it might be like to see those animals in person. Those teaching materials provide support in both vocabulary and content in this study. Besides, a worksheet entitled “My Country Study” was adopted from a website (https://www.activityvillage.co.uk). These worksheets were designed to encourage children to explore about the culture of the target country, and the
instructor asked the students to compile all sorts of interesting facts but left room for creativity too.
The material used for the third lesson was a worksheet designed by the teaching team of this study. The instructor applied the Double Bubble thinking map, which was created by the teaching team (shown in Appendix C) to guide the students to compare two cultures. The students started brainstorming in Chinese, and then the instructor provided them with a word bank and tablets to help them with the translation.
In the fourth lesson, the instructor took on the role as a facilitator to help the participants to gather all the cultural topics that they wanted to discuss with the Australian teacher since the purpose of the final lesson was to engage students with experience of cross-cultural interaction. The Australian teacher conducted a lesson aimed to answer all the students’ questions about him and his home culture.
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The Procedure of Implementing the Cultural Project
During the fall semester of 2018, students participated in the cultural project. The cultural project consisted of four lessons and each lesson took a month to be
completed. The instructor chose the culture of Australia as the learning target in the cultural project for the following reasons. Firstly, the project could increase students’
connection with the Australian teacher in the program since they were eager to know more about the background of the foreign teacher. Secondly, this project could also help students communicate better with their foreign teacher because of the knowledge acquired from the lessons and the motivation promoted by the cultural learning. The procedure and main content of the cultural project are presented below.
The first lesson was called “What is culture?” It contained four activities. The purposes of this lesson were to learn the fundamental elements of a culture,
understand the diversity of people by introducing the story book and observe the similarity and difference between students’ own culture and the target culture. In the first class, the instructor explained the content of the cultural project, as well as the definition. In the next week, the instructor asked her students to define culture. The participants needed to write down their definitions of culture on a worksheet. The completed worksheet showed their perception of culture at the beginning of the class.
Next, the instructor told a story called” Same Same but Different,” written by Jenny
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Sue Kostecki-Shaw. The instructor briefly introduced the background of the foreign teacher and asked the students to observe the similarities and differences between the teacher and them. Finally, students were divided into three groups and each student was assigned to draw one of the pages of a mini-story book to demonstrate what they found from their observation. When students finished drawing and writing their part of the mini-story, the instructor put all the pages together to become a mini book. The complete lesson plans can be found in Appendix D.
The second lesson was about facts related to Australia. The objective of this lesson was to gain factual knowledge of the target culture from the leveled book and the worksheets, cultivate student’s ability to use the equipment, and gather the
information and learn to organize the information and put them in the right categories which included the following topics: the meaning of a national flag, location,
population, food, sports, geography, languages, and landmarks. In the first activity, the instructor guided the students to read a leveled book about wildlife in Australia. Then, in the following three weeks, the instructor had students complete the My Country Study worksheets. Consequently, these lessons focused on informational gathering of
the target culture. These lessons set the foundation for continuing the following tasks.
The participants demonstrated the worksheets and wrote down their questions for the foreign teacher, which ended this topic. The complete lesson plans can be found in
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Appendix E.
The third lesson was about practicing cultural comparison through the Double Bubble thinking map. The purposes of this lesson were to encourage students to compare different topics by exercising their brain to think outside of the box, organize the idea and put them into the frame of thinking map and identify and interpret of two examples. The instructor did a whole class practice on board to demonstrate how the map should be like. Three groups were assigned different topics based on their selection. The instructor did a demonstration as the whole class practice in the first lesson. Then, the students did the discussion in Mandarin and translated the key words into English by tablets. They learned to make the connections between their own culture and the target culture. This activity aimed to train students to sort and connect information, which was an important skill to display their intercultural competence.
The complete lesson plans can be found in Appendix F.
The fourth lesson focused on cross-cultural communication. At the end of the previous lesson, the students wrote down some questions they were going to ask their foreign teacher. The instructor guided the students to organize their questions and ideas and encourage them to speak to their foreign teacher in English. Moreover, the Australian teacher conducted this lesson which included a hands-on learning activity by making lamington and blood rice cake, so the students learned and remembered
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things through physical movements. Furthermore, Jeff prepared the self-designed teaching materials to solve students’ problem. In this lesson, the instructor also acted as a translator to clarify the misunderstanding created by language barriers. The complete lesson plans can be found in Appendix G.
Table 2
The Content and the Purpose of the Cultural Project
Lessons Objectives Activities Instrument
An introduction diversity of people by introducing the story book.
3. Observe the similarity and difference between their own culture and the target culture.
Introduction of the culture portfolio/
What is culture?
Outline of the cultural different story book Introduction of
the foreign teacher?
Same-same but different story book Making mini
book of Same same but Different
Mini book
Report of mini book
Record of Mini book knowledge of the target culture from the level book and the worksheets.
2. Cultivate student’s ability to use the equipment and
My country study worksheet
Resource searching
My country study worksheet
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right categories.Resource Searching
My country study worksheet
My county study project
My country study worksheet
Report of my county study
My country study worksheet on the selected topics. brain to think outside of the box.
2. Organize the ideas different cultures.
2. Learn to compare two foods from different cultures
Short talk with Australian teacher
Self-designed PPT
Hands on learning-making Lamington
Self-designed PPT
Review of the whole project
worksheet
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Data Collection
Data were collected throughout the semester for four months. Multiple data sets were collected from the lessons of cultural project and group interviews. The data collected during the project consisted of worksheets from each lesson which included the worksheets of “what is culture?”, mini books, worksheets of my country study, and the double bubble thinking map. To lower students’ anxiety from the lack of language problem, a word bank and tablets were provided to help
students complete the worksheets in English. Besides, students used Mandarin as the primary language while conducting the group discussion in order to encourage them to express themselves freely. The curriculum design of the study started from
students complete the worksheets in English. Besides, students used Mandarin as the primary language while conducting the group discussion in order to encourage them to express themselves freely. The curriculum design of the study started from