Teaching: How to Teach Culture

In this online presentation Barry Tomalin (see the Globalisation, Communication & the Workplace post below for more details) outlines a methodology for teaching culture, and before drawing some interesting conclusions concerning the role of the language teacher in providing cultural training, provides some extremely helpful examples of lesson plans for developing cultural awareness in the language teaching classroom:

A version of this presentation was first given at the IATEFL conference in Exeter and Barry has updated some of the information and added one or two new insights to his commentary. The new link mentioned at the end of the talk is to the Diverse Europe at Work (DEW) website where you can follow the progress of this EU funded project.

Finally, here is the direct link to the Business Cultural Trainer's Certificate (BCTC) three-day course that Barry mentions.

If you have any comments or questions feel free to add them here or contact Barry directly using the contact details provided in the talk.

Interests: English Acquires its millionth word!

Just in case this event has passed you by, here's a link to an article informing us that English now has one million words! Interestingly, the word in question has a lot to do with teaching. Can you guess what it might be?

English acquires its millionth word

Amongst the many interesting things the article tells us we have this:

... new words are entering the language at the rate of 14.7 words a day. The internet has also revived the possibilities for independent word-coinage in a way not seen since Shakespeare’s time, when the language was acquiring its modern structure and words were being invented faster than ever before. Of the 24,000 words used by Shakespeare, some 1,700 were his own inventions.

Plenty to keep us and our English language students busy for a long, long time to come then!