This week's reading has basically two parts: teaching culture and integrating the four skills. I will start with the latter - I think that integration is one of the most promising ways of organizing instruction. I had courses, where we would do reading one day, writing another, grammar next week and listening comprehension some other time. And I could never understand why we wrote the longest essays for the Conversational skills part.
Teaching culture is especially acute for me as an ESL teacher and student. I think that it has to be done both implicitly (by modeling behaviour and showing examples without putting emphasis on it) and explicitly, with specific tasks and presentations. Another part of teaching culture is teaching or informing the students about cultural references. Just last week we read an essay in my comp class, which was about an African-American woman, who changed her name from Jill to Itabari to demonstrate her identity. The essay had a number of cultural references, c.f. someone called the author Miss Idi Amin. If you don't knw, who Idi Amin was, the scale of assault escapes your attention. We discussed the references in class and I was surprised that nobody mentioned the title. The essay about changing the name in search of one's true identity was inconspicuously titled What's In A Name?. For me that was a bit weird, since the message of the monologue is that a name does not define who we are, where as the message of the essay was the opposite, so the title created a nice little conflict, which I wanted to discuss. To my surprise none of my 25 students identified the title as a quote.
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From where I used to work in Taiwan, each colleague has his/her own English name. The reason why most of us have our English name is probably that's an American company. We seldeom called each other's name in Chinese. English name is just the way easy for us to remember and call. "Lillian" is just like a PRONOUN of me, and it doesn't define who I am.
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