Text 5. Cultural awareness

According to Tomalin and Stempleski (1993), cultural awareness encompasses three qualities:

- awareness of one’s own culturally-induced behavior

- awareness of the culturally-induced behavior of others

- ability to explain one’s own cultural standpoint (p.5)

Galloway (1984) has proposed a framework for building cultural understanding based primarily on process skills, but incorporating both factual and sociolinguistic content. She suggests organizing instruction around four primary categories of understanding:

1) Convention: The goal of this type is to help students recognizes and understand how people in a given culture typically behave in common situations. Galloway identifies two types of conventions: (1) context determined conventions, which includes extralinguistic behaviors that are characteristics in a given situation and (2) function-determined conventions related to sociolinguistic formulae or conventional utterances that are used to perform tasks in context. For example if one were teaching about foods, the teacher might focus on such context-determined factors as mealtimes, types of food, conventions of etiquette as well as on appropriate expressions associated with accepting and declining invitations, making reservations at a restaurant…

2) Connotation: The category of connotation deals with the many culturally significant meanings that are associated with words. As students examine their own networks of association they can begin to discover that the underlying meanings of words are determined by their cultural frame of reference. Galloway (1985) states certain words evoke a cluster of feeling and images. For example the word ‘time’ may make one nervous. At the symbolic level, it represents pressure, stress, deadlines, schedules, responsibility. Simply, a person may fear death etc.

3) Conditioning: A third category of cultural understanding has to do with the fact people act in a manner consistent with their cultural frame of reference, and all people respond in culturally conditioned ways to basic human needs to learn how to interpret behaviors that are different from their own without making judgments based on their own standards. Students need to learn how to interpret behaviors. If the students begin to expect cultural differences as natural and inevitable and realize that there are indeed a variety of possible differences to the universal need for food, shelter, social contact, and the like, they may begin to view the other culture more emphatically.

4) Comprehension: This category of cultural understanding includes such skills as analysis, hypothesis formation, and tolerance of ambiguity. According to Galloway (1985), comprehension goals can best be achieved by paying attention to the source of one’s information, examining one’s stereotypes avoiding overgeneralization, and the ways to resolve conflicts.

(Source: Zahra Ghorbani Shemshadsara. Developing Cultural Awareness in Foreign Language Teaching (2012). English Language Teaching Vol. 5, No. 3, 95-99.)