language teaching in multicultural classroom

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2009

This paper aims to examine the ways of incorporating multicultural literary texts in English language teaching curriculum to meet the needs of culturally diverse students. Teachers mainly use traditional reading strategies, therefore, they are not aware of, for example, Eurocentric biases which can be examined only by using postcolonial literary criticism. As a result, these teachers are not able to encourage their students to admit uncritically challenging representations of various cultural groups as they encounter these representations in their literary texts. Thus, teachers by using the postcolonial literary theory will lead their students to understand more effectively the representations of dominant and subaltern cultures to be found in both Eurocentric and postcolonial literary texts, and will achieve higher levels of multicultural literacy, which makes them more effective intercultural communicators.

The Educational Forum, 2005

As multicultural literature has made its way into the English curriculum, it has challenged teachers" thinking about curriculum and instruction and urged them to expand their teaching repertoire to include a culturalresponse approach to literature instruction. This article reports on a group of secondary English teachers' exploration and reflection on their learning and teaching of multicultural literature. The author argues that teachers must increase their own cultural knowledge and develop their sensitivity and teaching skills to promote cross-cultural understanding and use multicultural literature to validate expressions of cultural knowledge, perspectives, and differences.

The people of the Subcontinent have had exposure to English as the second language since British imperialism. However, nowadays Subcontinental writers are using English as a weapon to write back, if not curse back, a situation where, in Rushdie’s words, the Empire is writing back to the centre. Subcontinental writers are now attempting to celebrate local culture and give the foreign language a local colour. Besides, contemporary Subcontinental literature in English is a vibrant and powerful mixture made out of the English language. Therefore, Subcontinental literature, especially Bangladeshi literature like the piecess by Kaiser Haq, Khademul Islam, Niaz Zaman or the translation of Fakrul Alam, can be a vehicle of culture as well as communication, helping the teacher create a congenial educational atmosphere which can help students overcome constraints. Therefore, this practice will pave the way for an assertion of local culture and essence and acceptance of global, hybrid, communicative language. This paper focuses on the use of contemporary Subcontinental writings in class, with which we can keep students in direct touch with our culture, which is often celebrated in this type of writing, without creating any hindrance to language proficiency.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014

The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of incorporating culturally-loaded materials like literature in EFL courses. We selected short story as an example of literature to be included in our course syllabus. After that, some eclectic short stories from "Chicken Soup for the Soul" were selected. 14 students were randomly selected and assigned to two classes as control group and experimental groups. Finally, by comparing the mean and median of their final scores, we found that the experimental group outperformed the control group both in the final exam and also during the term considering classroom discussions.

International Education Studies, 2011

In the history of language teaching, literary texts have gradually been reduced to a source for linguistic learning, as an informative representation of cultural traits or even dismissed from the foreign language classroom. This paper aims to add reasons that justify considering literary texts a vital presence in the foreign language classroom. One general aim is to promote the study of foreign literature as enjoyable and (inter)culturally significant.The classroom is inevitably a culturally heterogeneous setting since its elements are already socialized subjects. Instead of its limiting role of supplying knowledge, the classroom ought to foster reading critically through a pedagogy of questioning the text, searching for and building textual meaning. Teaching literature in a foreign language should underline how literature offers new perspectives and how these views are directly relevant to the world we live in and the lives we lead.

2020

As the increase in the pace of globalised communications enables s eco n d -language (L2) students to become more proficient and enthusiastic about their learning, teaching literature i n the target language has taken new relevance and importance. A g rowing body of evidence indicates that teaching literature to L2 learners can provide a number of valuable outcomes, including helping students to understand and appreciate other cultures different fro m their own. Literature provides useful examp les of syntax and language usage in different genres, introducing a level of enjoy ment to the learning experience and encouraging L2 learners to pursue additional readings in the target language. The opportunity for immersion in the target culture takes the students to another level of appreciation of the cu lture and civilisation of the target language. To determine how these desirable outcomes can be imp lemented in s eco nd -language classrooms, this paper provides a review of the relevan...

2009

The project Teaching Literature in the Multicultural Classroom focused on ways in which pupils engaged with literary texts in primary and second classrooms which were multicultural and multilingual in their composition. The word “engage”, as used here, had two facets. One was attitudinal. Did pupils enjoy responding to and composing literary texts? The other was practicerelated. What specifi c practices did teachers engage students in to facilitate their response to literary texts and to foster acts of literary composition?

2020

Abstract: Cultural understanding cannot be separated from language learning. It can improve the language skills of language learners. Language teachers are suggested to teach not only the linguistic knowledge but also the cultural knowledge and to provide the media which can help learners to have better competence in using the language, in this case is English. One of the media is literature. It will help students to have closer and better look on the cultures where English is used. This cultural understanding is important to be promoted at early age. Young learners are at their best time in learning process, including in learning a culture through literature. This paper highlights the importance of cross cultural understanding and literature as the medium in the process of teaching English to young learners.

ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 2021

English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become a standardized mode of communication between diverse sociocultural groups. Besides linguistic competence, English language learners should possess adequate intercultural competence to establish successful social relations worldwide. Therefore, one of the main objectives of English language teaching (ELT) has become the development of intercultural speakers (Byram 1997; Kramsch 1998). One way of achieving this is by using literature in the classroom because learners interpret literary texts from their personal experience and are thus engaged both at a cognitive and an emotional level. Their individual interpretations can nevertheless also lead to generalizations and enforcement of stereotypes about foreign cultures. Hanauer (2001) has developed a method called focus-on-cultural understanding to expose learners to different interpretations. The study explores whether his method can be successfully applied in the context of Croatian universit...