WL ED 444 Language, Culture, and Classroom

Meeting Objectives: 2, 4, 7

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Under the impact of globalization, language teachers now faced the fact that one united, solid classroom culture can no longer fit learners’ needs. To cope with this challenge, the course bridged American culture(s) and culture (s) in Otavalo by reflecting on issues related to race, politics (e.g., why Ecuadorian use US dollar as their currency?) and culture in Ecuador. Because of this course, I became more aware of the reciprocal relationship between language and culture. 

The two response papers both reflected on my experiences with racism and ethnical issues (please refer to the attachments: response paper 1&2). When analyzing my experiences, I compared the experience of becoming a relatively minority international student in the State and the experience of staying in mainstream culture when I was in Taiwan. I then started to wonder: what kinds of culture should I present when teaching in Otavalo? How could I avoid imposing American culture while teaching American English? Even now, I have not come to a final answer, and I still worked on this when teaching of ESL015.

Inquiry project: observation and journal writing 

        The second project was a set of “culture inquiry journals” which I observed four incidents while living in Otavalo (please refer to the attached file “cultural inquiry journals”). In the journals, I did a comparison of Taiwanese, American, and Ecuadorian cultures. This practice still remains vividly in my mind and leads me to think about how to make culturally responsive classroom possible.

Final project: interview 

        The third project was a long-term project which a colleague and I interviewed four manufacturers about the impact of globalization to local economic (please refer to the file named: final project& presenting PPT). Although on the surface, this project seemed not so relevant to language teaching, economics of a community actually reveal students’ perception to language learning. From this project I learned that to understand the teaching context requires longitude inquiries but it is worthwhile.