Culture & SLA - Week 1 - Course Introduction

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 1 of the course Culture and Second Language Aquisition. The purpose of this blog is to facilitate our synchronous class activities and to serve as a visual record that you can refer back to for study purposes.

Todays's Goals:

• Learn the names and personal information of the majority of your classmates.
• Explore and clarify the structure of the course, the content to be covered, the evaluation activities, and important dates.
• Articulate your starting point notions about the subject of culture and culture teaching/learning.

Task 1: Who Are My Classmates?

Take a moment to get to know some of your classmates in this course. Click play on the video timer and discuss the following questions.

• What's your name and where do you live?
• How long have you been at ULACIT?
• What are your motivations for taking this master's program?
• What other courses are you taking this term?
• Are you currently a teacher? If so, where do you work?
• When planning and teaching a language course, how often do you explicitly consider the topic of culture?
• What other questions do you have for your partners?

Task 2: Exploring Key Issues in Culture

Since this is our first session, we are going to take some time to discuss the ideas you already have about the themes we will explore in this course. At the end of the term, we'll be able to look back on these "starting point ideas" and see how your thoughts about culture and language teaching have changed or deeped. Click your group link and follow the instructions in the document. 

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE
• Group 4: CLICK HERE
• Group 5: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Body Ritual among the Nacirema

To wrap of this first session, let's analyze a summary of a famous ethnographic case study that is often discussed in most introductory anthropology courses to see what insights it can give us about cultural perspectives. Click your group link.

• Part 1: CLICK HERE
• Part 2: CLICK HERE
• Part 3: CLICK HERE

References:

Miner, H. (1956). Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. American Anthropologist. 58(3), 503-507.