Citation: Murray, Harold., and Bollinger, Deborah. (2011). Developing Cross Cultural Awareness: Learning Through The Experiences of Others, Tesl Canadian Journal,19:82-93.
Cross-Cultural Understanding has been defined for teacher in a broad senses “the understanding and appreciation of different values and behaviors as they are experienced in different cultures and through different languages”. For the purposes of course development, this notion can be broken down into three components: an understanding of what culture is; how cultures differ in terms of their members' beliefs, values, and behavior; and how these differences influence communication. Somehow, it is difficult in addressing these issues in classroom, since students have never been going to another country which has another culture. This article offers some communicative activity in order to enhance cross cultural awareness of Japanese university students whose language levels range from beginner to intermediate. The first activity is E-Mai Exchanges. This activity involves students to exchange e-mail with their foreign friends so students will know about other cultures, and motivate them to communicate in English. The second activity is “Guest Speaker Interviews” which provides an opportunity for students to hear firsthand about the experience of traveling overseas and serves to heighten their awareness of what it is like to live abroad. The third activity is “Video Project” which the students can share the general goals of improving their oral English proficiency, increasing their knowledge of other cultures, and learning to communicate more effectively with people from other cultures. These activities are successful in developing cross-cultural awareness. It can be seen from the students’ response towards these activities such as "I learned the differences between Japanese and foreign country about way of thinking, conversational-style, sense of values, and so on." Or "I feel this project was most interesting in this class because we can do interviews to use English and know many communication differences directly."
Cross-Cultural Understanding has been defined for teacher in a broad senses “the understanding and appreciation of different values and behaviors as they are experienced in different cultures and through different languages”. For the purposes of course development, this notion can be broken down into three components: an understanding of what culture is; how cultures differ in terms of their members' beliefs, values, and behavior; and how these differences influence communication. Somehow, it is difficult in addressing these issues in classroom, since students have never been going to another country which has another culture. This article offers some communicative activity in order to enhance cross cultural awareness of Japanese university students whose language levels range from beginner to intermediate. The first activity is E-Mai Exchanges. This activity involves students to exchange e-mail with their foreign friends so students will know about other cultures, and motivate them to communicate in English. The second activity is “Guest Speaker Interviews” which provides an opportunity for students to hear firsthand about the experience of traveling overseas and serves to heighten their awareness of what it is like to live abroad. The third activity is “Video Project” which the students can share the general goals of improving their oral English proficiency, increasing their knowledge of other cultures, and learning to communicate more effectively with people from other cultures. These activities are successful in developing cross-cultural awareness. It can be seen from the students’ response towards these activities such as "I learned the differences between Japanese and foreign country about way of thinking, conversational-style, sense of values, and so on." Or "I feel this project was most interesting in this class because we can do interviews to use English and know many communication differences directly."
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