Chapter I. Authentic materials help the learners learn the language of the world

CHAPTER II. THE ESSENTIAL SKILLS IN DEVELOPING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE
2.1. Authentic materials and tasks as mediators to develop EFL students.
Affirming different cultural orientations through culturally responsive teaching is not just about “show and tell,” the so-called food, festival, folklore and fashion mantra. Teachers take into consideration a variety of school protocols, such as how and what students are learning, styles of communication, assessment practices, and activities related to inclusiveness.2 However, I argue that infusing appropriate cultural material into curriculum and policy is only one component; most importantly, as educators in diverse classrooms, we need to develop effective intercultural competence, which requires the following attributes: respect for and appreciation of other cultures, worldviews and communication styles an understanding of other people’s behaviours, cultural customs and ways of thinking regardless of how unusual or strange they may appear the ability and willingness to acknowledge and accept different behaviours and ideas in a nonjudgmental way, especially opinions and perspectives with which we do not necessarily agree awareness of our own biases and behaviours in order to respond in a culturally appropriate manner curiosity, flexibility and the willingness to adapt and be open to different ways of thinking and behaving.⁴ Understanding different cultural behaviours begins with knowledge– an awareness of what motivates people to think the way they think and do what they do. We need to recognize that the expectations we have as classroom teachers and those of our diverse students may not always align because our respective beliefs about and attitudes toward family, social life, work and education are shaped by our respective backgrounds.⁵ For example, the education system in Canada has primarily been based on a Eurocentric, Western model which affirms individualism. As a guideline, individualistic cultures tend to focus on independence, personal achievement and assertiveness, as opposed to collectivist cultures, which focus on loyalty to the group and allegiance to family.3 Differences in values, such as obedience to authority figures, which in a collectivist culture is often exhibited in teacher-centered forms of instruction, can significantly affect students’ ways of thinking and behaviour. As a result, students from cultures with a predominant collectivist orientation, such as Japan, may find self-guided, discovery-oriented activities more challenging than ones that are more teacher-directed and predictable. They may also seem restrained on the emotional level, avoid eye contact with teachers and be reluctant to volunteer answers in class. Research has also shown that with regard to seeking social support, let’s say, help from a school counsellor, students from individualistic cultures may be more willing because they share the cultural assumption that people should be proactive and talk openly about stressful events. Conversely, students coming from more collectivistic cultures may be relatively more cautious about getting help and disclosing personal problems because they share the cultural assumption that individuals should not burden others, even close family, with their issues. They feel they might disrupt group harmony and receive criticism from others.4 Considering we have students in our schools who have experienced post-traumatic stress, bullying and acculturation challenges, it important to be aware of the latter attitude toward counselling. They may be reluctant to tell their story. It is also important to recognize that factors such as context and personality can influence cultural dynamics like individualism/collectivism, so even individuals within a particular culture can exhibit different cultural behaviours. Indeed, as we learn about our students’ cultures, it is best not to make assumptions based on experiences we have had with other students from similar backgrounds. Culturally responsive teaching requires teachers to keep an open, non-judgmental mindset. In many respects, one of the biggest challenges for teachers in any grade is communicating with parents, some of whom may have minimal ability to communicate in English. Like their children, they too are learning to understand an unfamiliar social and school context, which includes their role in relation to teachers and school administrators. Taking the everyday example of a parent-teacher conference, teachers can use a number of strategies to aid parents’ comprehension.5 Before the conference, a list of educational terms and definitions learning centres, hands-on activities, critical thinking, task-based learning, goal setting can be provided. When answering parents’ questions, paraphrasing and then articulating points in succession helps parents understand what is coming. So in reply to the question, “How is my daughter doing compared to other students in the class?” the teacher can say: “You asked about how your daughter compares to other children in the class. First, I am going to talk about her progress, and then I will talk about how she compares with her classmates.” Teachers can also politely ask parents to summarize important components to make sure they are clear, especially if they need to take action such as scheduling time for homework or nightly reading. Parents may have culturally rooted perceptions about discipline, standardized testing, and other educational practices as well as their role in their child’s schooling. They may have had little, if any, involvement with their children’s school in their home country. Parents may also view teachers as experts and so may not feel comfortable questioning their authority or offering suggestions. When we send notes or emails home with information, we expect or at least hope.that parents read all the information and will respond to requests, such as providing permission for their child to attend a field trip. We may also make the assumption that if parents do not understand a note from school, they will contact the teacher and ask for clarification. However, misunderstandings can occur and teachers may never be aware of them because the parents haven’t communicated with the school directly. The signal may be that the child is absent from school, which is an indirect way albeit possibly culturally acceptable from their perspective of them showing their disapproval or confusion about an activity or event. Or they might write the school an email or send a note with the child expressing their concerns, as opposed to showing up in person. The concept of saving face comes to play in this regard.6 As a social construct related to preserving dignity and self-respect, saving face plays an important role in many cultures. Threats to face are likely to arise, possibly for both parties, when problems related to school protocols are pointed out too directly. Consequently, it is often a good idea to minimize these threats when confronting parents about the fact that they and their children have not understood, for example, homework instructions or, as in the scenario above, informing the school of absences and reasons for them. Parents often have great respect for teachers; however, it is important to establish trust with the family by, for example, meeting with family members in a place they feel safe, such as home or a local community center. Parents should have the opportunity to ask questions they may have about school culture, and expectations for their involvement. They can also share preferred ways to communicate with teachers. For example, if they are more comfortable writing notes and email messages and using translators or online translation software, as opposed to meeting in person, then their choices should be acknowledged and utilized. Indeed, and especially for parents of ELLs, affirming their home languages and cultures, and showing respect for what they know and what they can offer, are critical factors in helping them become more involved in their children’s education. What’s more, looking at and valuing different cultural orientations may help to identify ways to foster the kinds of relationships between school personnel and parents that will improve student outcomes. Developing intercultural competence involves systematically observing and critically reflecting on our own, our students’ and their parents’ behaviours. Although there are several models of intercultural competence, fundamental components comprise three basic elements: attitudes, knowledge and skills. Based on Deardorff’s Model of Intercultural Competence,7 we can ask ourselves the following questions: Attitudes: Do I pre-judge my students? Am I curious, open and eager to learn from them? How do I react when I don’t understand what my students are doing or saying? Knowledge: Am I aware of my own cultural behaviour and why I think and act the way I do? Am I aware of how my students wish to be treated? Which rules, customs and values influence my own and my students’ thinking, actions and communication? Skills: How much do I really listen to my students? Do I respond in a culturally appropriate manner? How can I change my mindset to describe behaviours before evaluating them? The Mindful Reflection Protocol is helpful in providing educators with a method to foster effective intercultural communication.8Teachers are encouraged to distinguish objective descriptions of behaviour from those which are subjective and emotionally laden reactions. The protocol is as follows: Describe: What is the student doing or saying? Interpret or Analyze: Why is this happening? Evaluate: How do I feel about it? It is grounded in the notion that we often respond to unfamiliar people or situations with subjective evaluations, projecting our judgments onto what we think we see (or hear or feel or perceive). So we reverse the usual order of response by first making observations and withholding our reactions with words such as “weird” or “unacceptable” – and in the process become more aware of how easily and unconsciously we immediately judge a situation according to our own cultural mindset. Learning about different cultural orientations, along with on-going self-reflection, allows us to develop intercultural competence and effective culturally responsive teaching. Shunnarah, a kindergarten teacher in a culturally and linguistically diverse school, explains that “developing cultural competence is a process of inner growth. In order for me to be as effective as possible with the students I work with, I must continuously engage in a process of self-reflection. To be able to know others, especially diverse others, one must know the self. So, the growth of a culturally competent educator starts there. We must look within for a deeper understanding of who we are before we can adequately address the needs of our students.”9 Developing intercultural competence involves a transformation in thinking; it is an ongoing, highly rewarding process. Indeed, honest and open communication is key and highly relevant to teaching diverse students who need and deserve to be welcomed, supported and heard. Authentic materials. The use of authentic materials in EFL classrooms may be useful for teachers and students to develop not only grammatical skills but also to reinforce students’ ability to understand and contextualize the language used in the classroom and the language people use in other social contexts. Furthermore, English language teachers can develop their creativity when designing and adapting material to promote more learning of the target language and its use. For the development of this project, authentic materials are taken as the material that is not designed for teaching purposes; it means that the material utilized is not commercially produced to teach a target language itself, which can include EFL/ESL textbooks, audiotapes, workbooks, worksheets, etc. As a matter of fact, the authentic material utilized was American and Colombian currency, movies, and history texts about religions. Furthermore, the students participating in the study had the opportunity to share what they had learnt from those tasks with their classmates. These students designed and used posters, brochures, and videos for sharing what they had learnt from the tasks developed. Porter and Roberts show several differences between authentic materials and nonauthentic materials in terms of spoken language. For example, conversations recorded for language texts often have a slow pace, have particular structures which recur with obtrusive frequency, and have very distinct turn-taking of speakers. Also, hesitations such as “uh’s” and “mm’s” are often missing, and sentences are very well-formed with few if any mistakes. In other words, what the language learners hear in class is different from the language in other social contexts. In one of the semi-structured interviews, for instance, the participating students claimed feeling nervous when speaking in English due to feeling afraid of making mistakes or 31 misusing the grammar rules. In many cases, the language heard in EFL classrooms is a stilted use of spoken English; the real objective of teaching this language is lost because of a need to teach specific language points in a method that some teachers may feel would be more understandable for learners. Nunan also defines authentic materials as spoken or written language data that have been produced in the course of genuine communication, and not specifically written for purposes of language teaching. In fact, in his teaching practices, he encourages students to bring into the classroom their own samples of authentic language data from “real-world” contexts outside of the classroom. In this sense, the use of authentic materials to address cultural topics in an EFL classroom allows students to practice “real” language, to listen to different accents, understand their classmates, and make themselves understood. The main idea for developing this research project was then to encourage the participating students to develop their intercultural competence by using English as a means to express ideas, feelings, and opinions; and to bring the “real world” into the classroom in terms not only of the English language but also as a space to exchange intercultural encounters. This purpose looked to help the participating students become more critical about happenings in our country and the world. Contradictorily, authors as Kilickaya claim that authentic materials add a burden on teachers as these may contain difficult vocabulary and structures that need more effort to be simplified to make them appropriate for their learners. This statement helped me, as the researcher, to analyze the role of authentic materials on the participating students before, during, and after developing the task, and also to think about the questions students should be asked. I always asked my students how they felt using that kind of material, how hard it was to read and understand, and to write about. During the development of the tasks, I became a support for my students i.e. I always made sure that they understood the materials. Using authentic materials in an EFL classroom is not an easy task, but time consuming; however, English language teachers should support language learning and help learners value their own culture and avoid generalizations among other cultures. Authentic tasks. Scholars such as Brown and Menasche provide a controversial view of authentic tasks by noting that “there is probably no such thing as ‘real task authenticity’ since classrooms are, by nature artificial.” However, Widdowson claims that “it is the relationship between the learner and the input text, and the learner’s response to it, that should be characterised as authentic, rather than the input text itself.” Thus in foreign language learning contexts, where exposure to the language being learned is scarce, English language teachers should create spaces within the classrooms with the objective of making students have access to authentic tasks that permit them to study the language structure and to focus on more than one skill at the same time. Through my experience, it was common to assign pedagogical tasks to students to grade them about a single grammatical structure and almost always by using only one skill per task; as a result, students came to believe that the English language was something they learned by pieces and not being able to use it to know or talk about their own culture and others’. Thus, there was an imperative need to implement tasks which would facilitate learners to meaningfully and purposefully use English within varied contexts and contents, valuing these rather than merely grammar structures. Language and culture in an EFL classroom. The integration of culture in language teaching is based on the assumption that one cannot be explored without the other; they are interrelated. Teaching culture is certainly not a recent idea; on the contrary, there is a history of the use of culture while teaching a foreign language. According to Lessard-Clouston as cited in Thanasoulas, “In the past, people learnt a foreign language to study its literature, and this was the medium of culture.” This is why language learners had to read extensive literary books such as Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. By reading these literary books, they were supposed to learn the structures of the target language and the expressions that speakers of that language were more likely to use. Nowadays, in Colombia, in the Foreign Language Teaching field, there have been studies related to addressing culture and interculturality. Those studies cover materials to develop ICC, the development of intercultural competence skills, critical intercultural learning through topics of deep culture in an EFL classroom. Rodriguez, 2015, and the cultural content in EFL textbooks. Although the topic of intercultural competence has interested English language teachers in Colombia, the reality of these teachers’ practices may be different; the teaching of language forms may continue being the focus. That is the case of the private university where this current study took place. According to the design of its syllabus, English language is still seen as a subject to be taken for graduation requirements, learners focus on studying grammar structures and getting ready to take a test that assesses their knowledge about those grammar rules learnt in the English language classes. Thus, culture in this context is not in their goals as addressing culture in the English language classroom. As a consequence, learners give much priority to test scores since passing the courses is a requisite for their degree. Considering the Colombian Ministry of Education, one can say there is no teaching of a language without teaching the culture of that language. Language teachers may sometimes forget the real necessity of learning a target language: the importance of using languages to know the differences and commonalities that people have around the world by becoming more respectful and responsible citizens. Intercultural competence. I understand this concept mainly from the definition given by the Common European Framework of Reference and from a teacher’s guide to IC. The reason for using these sources is that they both have nurtured this research project on how to address culture in an EFL classroom. When looking at what the CEFR says on intercultural competence, it first mentions intercultural awareness. It means that an individual is aware of the fact that people belong to many social communities, wherein national culture is one of these Intercultural awareness refers to “an understanding that two people from the same country do not share the exact beliefs or traditions because of merely sharing the same national culture”. This type of thinking promotes the perception of people from other countries as complex individuals and aims to inhibit a way of thinking in which people are perceived through national stereotypes. Byram, Gribkova, and Starkey give a more detailed definition of intercultural competence by first explaining the concept and by mentioning the component of IC; hence, we understand or see what is needed in order to say that someone is interculturally competent. These authors describe IC communication as based on respect and understanding of different cultures without only judging the conversational partner from the culture he or she comes from. To be able to perform this type of communication, they argue that “the individual needs to develop a competence within three components, which are considered to be IC components: Skills, knowledge and attitudes”. The knowledge component refers to knowledge about cultural aspects of the target culture. The attitudes refer to the willingness of the individual to understand, which is the basis of achiving IC, since negative attitudes towards exploring and familiarizing oneself with different cultures will result in not actually understanding them. The third component, skills, refers to the procedural knowledge of IC that an individual needs to develop. It includes the competence of being able to relate to different aspects in the target culture, and in that way get a better understanding of the target culture. For this research project the three concepts of intercultural competence were taken into consideration. Those concepts supported me, as the researcher, at the time of deciding about the tasks carried out during the period of the development of the tasks. At the pre-task, the participating students were exposed to cultural aspects from the target culture and their own home culture so that they were able to get more familiar with the topics; then, during the task, the students could addresse cultural topics through oral presentations and written reports. Likewise, during the post tasks, they had the opportunity to include some sort of reflection on what was studied.