Intercultural
Competence
Intercultural resources for teaching EFL teachers
Exploration-
Integrating perspectives through making comments on news articles
Learning Objectives
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Explore the idea that languages sometimes encode meanings that can be difficult to access in other languages from a news article.
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Understand how cultural values guide people to form different communication norms.
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Recognize how people may fail to understand each other because they follow different communication norms.
Module Overview
People from different backgrounds have different perceptions of the world. For example, more Americans than Europeans view poverty a result of lack of effort instead of social injustice, while Europeans perceive poverty as a trap in which unlucky people fall into. “Poverty” reflects on the idea that the poor could help themselves if they really tried, while “unfair wealth distribution” reveals the belief that the society has to address the systemic problems that the poor face. This example revealed that a particular worldview is often constructed by culture. The content of this unit does not focus on the notion of right or wrong, biased or unbiased, true or false, but rather the attempt to trace where do those assumptions come from or lead to, and the underlying implications.
Task 1
Explore the concept through visual images
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When you hear the word "immigrant," what image comes to your mind first? Why? Think about this question for 10 seconds and make comments below.
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How does your first language use the word "immigrant"? Do people use it in a positive or negative way?
Task 2
Working with news article through making comments
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Read the first news article. What does the word "immigrant" illicit under this cultural context?
The Taiwan Association for Human Rights said that the Ministry of Education’s high-school curriculum guidelines employ discriminatory language to refer to foreign spouses and other immigrants, perpetuating negative stereotypes of immigrants by using such phrases as “foreign brides,” “Filipino maids” and “Indonesian maids.”
The use of such terms is unacceptable, they said, adding that the government has long declared its preferential use of the phrase “foreign spouses” over “foreign brides.”
Furthermore, referring to immigrant women as “brides” perpetually defines them through their marriage instead of as individuals, they said.
The groups prefer the use of “migrant workers” or “Southeast Asian immigrants” instead of “maids” or “foreign laborers,” they said. “The marriage ceremony lasts for only a day, but we get referred to as foreign brides for more than 20 years,” TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan, executive secretary Hong Man-chi said.
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Image via: https://tw.appledaily.com/new/realtime/20150519/612824/
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I got married for a day, but I was called a foreign bride for many years.
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Read the second news article. What does the word "immigrant" illicit under this cultural context?
The 29-year-old World Cup winner Mesut Ozil has quit the German national team with a powerful public statement in which he accuses the national team treated him with "racism and disrespect". Ozil, whose family origins are part Turkish, has faced criticism within the German media after he posed for a photograph with Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. You can read his response below.
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I am a German when we win, but an immigrant when we lose.
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Two readings above have different interpretations to "immigrant." How do EFL teach the word immigrant to students?
