Cultural Awareness

Raising cultural awareness in a classroom is extremely important.  It is important for every classroom, whether there is a non native speaker in it or not.  In cases where there is a student from another culture, teachers might often try to make that student feel comfortable my including their culture into the classroom acts, but it is necessary to teach those other students about that culture as well.  As a way of not singling any one person out, I have always thought that it would be fun to dedicate a week every so often to learning about another culture.  

Especially with the technology and internet, it is becoming more and more important for students to be able to interact with other cultures every day.  All over the internet, people from many different cultures are interacting.  Whether it be facebook, playing online games, or even in researching a topic for school, it is important to take in the ideals and thoughts of those from other cultures to understand what you are viewing.  If students are unaware of what's out there, they can become very closed minded and  possibly even xenophobic.  In teaching cultural awareness to your students, you are helping them to become citizens of the world and hopefully building towards a tolerant classroom, which becomes a tolerant school, and others will learn from that as well.



Paper articles:

1. Learning to Read in a Second Language: Research,
Implications, and Recommendations for Services by ESTHER GEVA, PhD
http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/documents/GevaANGxp.pdf

2. Writing Theory and Practice in the Second Language Classroom: A Selected Annotated Bibliography by Torild Homstad & Helga Thorson http://writing.umn.edu/isw/assets/pdf/publications/Homstad_Thorson94.pdf

3. English-as-a-Second-Language Reading Instruction in the United States: A Research Review by Jill Fitzgerald
http://jlr.sagepub.com/content/27/2/115.full.pdf