No culture, no language – understanding how culture impacts language learning and teaching 

When we teach a foreign language, we teach students from different backgrounds and cultures, and we do that as teachers from different backgrounds and cultures, bringing in our own (first) language and cultural experience from which our learners benefit as often, interaction and communication requires strategies of a lingua franca, i.e. a common language shared by speakers from different linguistic backgrounds.

However, when looking at course materials and testing sheets, we can see that conventions of communication, expressions and politeness are still dominated by a native-speaker model. In this interactive workshop, we will explore to what extent we are moving away and have to move away from those conventions. As language teachers, we need to explore how pluricultural today’s teaching of language is and how important it is to integrate an understanding of the cultural impact factors on both language learning and teaching. We will explore what strategies can help to enable effective communication and collaboration, e.g. the use of questions, demonstrating sensitivity and skills of reflection as well as being able to anticipate certain issues like misunderstandings that might occur. Only awareness of these impact factors will help our learners to interact successfully by taking the sociolinguistic and cultural aspects of their communication and transactions into account. How we can implement such strategies in our language-teaching classroom and how our learners can see that they aremaking progress will be two key takeaways from this workshop.

Reference:https://rm.coe.int/cefr-companion-volume-with-new-descriptors-2018/1680787989

Bio:

Kirsten Waechter has been a business English trainer since 1998 teaching in-company courses and university students. Today she focuses on teaching business communication, ESP and intercultural courses. She is also a materials writer and translator.