Selasa, 06 Desember 2016

Adapting a Turkish middle school textbook to develop cultural awareness


Tomalin and Stempleski (1994) identify three qualities of cultural awareness: awareness of learners’ own cultural behaviour, awareness of others’ cultural behaviour, and the ability to explain their own cultural position, and adopt a task-oriented approach towards teaching culture, where learners cooperate in pairs or groups for gathering, sharing, discussing and interpreting information in view of both the target and native cultures. For this reason, the present activities are designed in such a way that (1) learners in pairs and groups work together to collect information, (2) decide whether the situation is similar or different in their own culture, (3) express their own stance toward the situation by drawing on from their real lives. Consequently, originally a sexist and unstimulating material has been reconstructed by such adaptation strategies as addition, modification, omission, reordering, and replacement, and exploited to resist stereotyping, and to develop cultural awareness and tolerance.
As a future teacher we need to select the appropriate books and materials to teach to the students. The materials in the books itself should balanced between the language proficiency and intercultural competence. Therefore, the teacher can adapt some strategies from this journal to add the cultural content, modify the materials, and omit the unimportant and irrelevant materials and replacement with the better materials in order to achieve the language and cultural needs.

Reference: A journal entitled Adapting a Turkish middle school textbook to develop cultural awareness by Meliha R. Simsek, 2014


1 komentar:

  1. The topic of your writing is really fresh, the awareness of the teacher toward the material that used by children should be the focus of the teacher. Awareness toward the cultural value of their nationality maybe the good one, rather than we have to only focus on the native or purpose language. Although you're focus on the authentic material, its better for you to also relate it with indonesian cultural

    BalasHapus