Teaching Children Culture in the EFL Context

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5. Classroom decorations

Hendon (1980) suggested that to enrich the students’ cultural learning

experience in an EFL context, the teachers can start from adding the cultural element into the physical environment to which the students are exposed. For instance, he suggested the teachers can decorate the classroom by hanging colorful posters and pictures or world maps. Those posters and maps can later be developed into different cultural activities, for example, asking the students to identify or mark any

knowledge they know about the countries on the world map.

All in all, to incorporate culture learning in the language classroom means to transform the classroom into a venue where language learners can experience how multifarious aspects of a culture are reflected through its language, and how different language uses render different cultural connotations and effects. By allowing the learners to keep examining and comparing other cultures with their own culture at a conscious level, learners may decenter their own perspective

(Byram, 2008); that is, they can become more objective thinkers and have the ability to understand and accept other cultural entities with embracing and tolerating

perspectives.

2.3.5 Teaching Children Culture in the EFL Context

The idea of incorporating teaching of culture in children’s language education has been seconded by many scholars (e.g., Byram et al., 2002; Tinsley, 2003) due to several positive effects they can well bring to the young ones. Children experience the process of socialization and enculturation at a very young age (Poole, 1994).

That is, during those processes, their awareness about culture, self-identity, worldview, interactional style, etc., are simultaneously developing. For instance,

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Hirschfeld (1996) reported that children are able to distinguish people with different ethnicities at age between three and five. Additionally, Barrett (2013) indicated that after having acquired knowledge or information about different countries, children may subsequently develop stereotypes of different nationalities before the age of seven; once the stereotype is established, young children are less likely to change their stereotypical thinking (Ambady, Shih, Kim, & Pittinsky, 2001). Therefore, culture teaching can help prevent children from developing possibly faulty, twisted, and wrongful stereotypical assumption toward others with different cultural backgrounds at an early age.

While the English teaching community recognizes the equal importance on the development of culture and language ability even for young learners, yet it seems that the teaching of culture is often ignored or has not received adequate attention in L2 classroom. It is observed that in most ESL/EFL classrooms, more focus has been placed on the faculty of skill which emphasizes grammar and vocabulary knowledge (Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 1998). As for the case in Taiwan, Tsai (2002) pointed out four major problems that hinder the practice of cultural instruction in Taiwan, which include (a) the deficiency of teachers’ cultural knowledge, (b) the inadequacy of cultural components in the English textbooks and teacher’s manuals, (c) the difficulty in obtaining cultural materials and resources, and (d) the constraint of instructional time. Moreover, according to Chang (2010), most cultural contents for elementary school students lack cultural diversity because most of them are exclusively about American culture and are presented in short and facts-only sentences.

To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, most of the cross-cultural projects in Taiwan are centered around the university student participants, and only a paucity of studies have dedicated to the studies on integrating culture into English learning for

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children in Taiwan. Tsou’s (2005) and Chang’s (2010) studies are two of the rare examples. In Tsou’s study, she adopted a quantitative method and investigated 109 fifth graders (55 students in the experimental group and 54 students in the control group) for a duration of one semester to examine the effects of culture teaching. The researcher along with the language teacher designed the materials and activities for the culture-based contents. The procedure of the culture instruction is summarized as follows (Tsou, 2005, p. 44):

1. Asking students to first think about what the topic meant in relation to students’ own culture.

2. Presenting and discussing pictures, real objects or authentic materials from native or target cultures associated with the topics being studied.

3. Doing activities, such as mini-drama, fantasy experience, and comparing/contrasting processes.

4. Providing additional but relevant information about the topic being studied.

To ensure students fully comprehend the contents, Tsou also allowed students to use Chinese to discuss relevant cultural issues in class. The result showed that the

cultural instruction not only enhances the experimental groups’ language proficiency but also heightens their motivation toward English learning.

As for Chang’s (2010) study, she adopted a qualitative case study to investigate the development of three six graders’ intercultural communicative competence and their English learning attitude after they participated in a cross-cultural project that allowed them to use weblogs to communicate and interact with international partners. After five-month cross-cultural project, the result was quite appealing. On one hand, the participants’ attitudes toward English learning were enhanced through the authentic interaction and communication with their international partners. On the

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other hand, it showed that young as the participants were, they already demonstrated their development of ICC as they manifested their willingness and abilities to solve misunderstanding on cross-cultural issues, to reflect on their own culture, and to transfer from an etic to an emic perspective on cultural issues. On a final note, Chang concluded that to have a successful Internet-based cross-cultural project, the students need to be more autonomous and active to participate; also, the instructor needs to facilitate the students by being encouraging and resourceful through the whole process.

Both Tsou’s and Chang’s studies have provided some insight into ways of designing effective cultural curriculum aimed for young learners in Taiwan. Yet, just as both of them suggested, more studies are still in need to offer more empirical evidence about the effects of cultural instruction on language learning so as to get more teachers to integrate culture teaching in their classes.