Article 1

This article talked about the relationship between culture and teaching English to students of other languages.  This is something that can often be difficult for teachers who have not been experienced with other cultures to understand.  Therefore, since I am an elementary education major, this is something that I find very important because even if I am not planning on working in a specific ESL setting, I want to be able to help and understand ESL students that may be in my classroom.  This article helped me reflect on my own ideas of different cultures and how I may use it in my future classroom.

As I read the article, I tried to think of what my own interpretation of culture is.  I think is can be based on “where you’re from”; whether that includes geography, like different states or even different countries, or it could be looked at as generational.  As the article stated, culture is not “neatly bound”, and can be highly individualized.  To go deeper, although I was raised in the same house by the same parents as my sisters, the three of us have been exposed to such different things in our lives that our culture backgrounds are extremely different.  They have lived places such as Mexico, Argentina, Spain, and Taiwan, while I have never been exposed to any of those places.  From a generation standpoint, I would consider my culture of learning far more different than that of my parents, for they did not have the ways of technology in which I have.  However, this can be looked at as a geographical issue as well.  People from less-technological parts of the world would not research a paper the same way as I would, which usually consists of simply typing my topic into Google and reading about it there. 

This made me think of a whole other issue, which is, when I have a student from another culture in my classroom, the issue in learning may not JUST be able a language barrier, instead, that this student may very well not be familiar with the American education system and all that comes with it.  I can relate: this past year, I studied abroad in Scotland.  Here, they spoke English (which still included a large language barrier), but when taking my courses, there were things that I had never heard of before but was expected to know.  This was not just limited to school work either, and included things like what they consider polite manners, such as word choice or tipping at a restaurant.  This helped me to think that when one is introduced to a new culture, there are a whole group of issues that can arise, aside from just the language issue.  Through this course, I hope to look further into these differences so that in my future classroom I can relate to my students as much as possible, for although I will not know every culture, I will want my students to know that I am interested.