Culture & SLA - Week 10 - Social Contexts of SLA

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 10 of the course Culture and Second Language Acquisition for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIIC0 2022. This week we will follow up on the topic of pragmatics that you saw in many of your reading group articles last week in order to look at the social contexts the shape the second language acquisition process. We will also participate in our pending reading group workshop and clarify instructions about the culture lesson plan assignment.

Today's Goals:

• Analyze cultural differences in communication styles and pragmatics.
• Discuss the ways that social contexts can influence the process of SLA.

Guiding Questions:

• How do social factors influence the second language acquisition process?
• What cultural feature am I thinking about including in my lesson plan?

Warm Up: Analyzing Pragmatic Considerations

As you know, becoming communicatively competent involves more thant just linguistic knowledge. Pragmatic and interactional competence are essential to ensure smooth social interactions among cultures. Click the link below to read a brief handout adapted from Stringer and Cassiday (2009).

• Digital Handout: CLICK HERE

Task 1: Social Context of SLA

For homework you focused on the "Macrosocial Factors" that affect the out comes of the SLA process. Let's take a moment to focus more on each of these factors in a class discussion. Click the link below.

• Discussion Task: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Reading Group Workshop

Now it's time for your reading group workshop. Before we participate in your presentations, let's quickly review the learning objective and justification.

• Learning Objective: Demonstrate your ability to read an academic article and accurately identify and synthesize key concepts presented in the text in order to lead a group discussion exploring the implications of the theory to your teaching practice.

• Justification: A key skill of a professional educator is the ability to draw upon relevant theory from academic literature from the field in order to inform his or her teaching practice. Although academic texts can be challenging, it is essential to develop the ability to read, interpret, and synthesize the core ideas of academic articles when pursuing a degree in a graduate level program.

• Group 1: Natalia and Sandra - Cultural Codes for Calls: The use of commercial television in teaching culture in the classroom

• Group 2: Francisco, Peter, & Stephanie - Cultural Mirrors: Materials and methods in the EFL classroom

• Group 3: David, Jessica, & Arianna - Materials for Cultural Awareness

Peer Feedback Framework

Task 3: Prepare Your Culture Lesson Plan

Your homework for the week is to submit your culture lesson plan based on the Four Cultural Knowings and the Experiential Learning Cycle. A few weeks ago, you participated in a demo lesson on the topic of tipping in US culture that followed the same cyle. Take a moment to brainstorm some possible cultural topics you would like to explore in your lesson plan.

The final chapter in in Moran's book can be very helpful for thinking of possible activity types, question prompts, outcomes, and teacher roles in the four stages of the plan.

Click to see full size image.

Click to see full size image.

Feel free to also take a look at the lesson plan for the Demo class as inspiration.

• Demo Lesson Plan: CLICK HERE

Your other pending assignment is the group project to analyze a textbook. Do you have any questions about this?

• Textbook Analysis: CLICK HERE

References:

Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice. Heinle Cengage Learning.

Savile-Troike, M. (2012). Introducing Second Language Acquisition. (2nd Ed.) Cambridge University Press.

Stringer, D. & Cassiday, P. (2009). 52 Activities for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication. Intercultural Press.