Wednesday 18 January 2012

Cultural awareness

The world nowadays has become a much smaller place.  Globalisation, travelling for knowing other cultures or performing academic activities, or even settling down in search of job opportunities and/or better living conditions are aspirations that are making part of many people’s life projects.  As a result of this way of thinking, one aspect has emerged: the necessity of having an effective communication and understanding with people of other cultures. In other words to have “cultural competence” is a necessity these days.

When a person has activated his/her cultural competence, s/he can interrelate with foreign people by understanding their cultural characteristics and by even changing their prejudices to have wide and open-minded perceptions, thoughts and feelings towards the target culture(s) of interaction. Nevertheless this competence is not born by magic. It is here where cultural awareness plays an important role in the development of cultural competence. To be conscious of the fact that our own culture and other cultures have cultural values, differences, similarities or connections that can nurture our relations helps us be culturally competent.

To activate our cultural awareness is not only a mission for foreign language learners but also for foreign language teachers. These latter individuals are educators and mediators of the language they are teaching and thus representatives of the culture the language subject of teaching. Therefore, as we have seen in class, it is important to have in minded the following notions and recommendations included in the slide presentation below:


Now, let me propose you an exercise. Let us have a virtual travel to the London in the United Kingdom and New York in the United States by using the pictures embedded in the following slide presentation. 


After that inspirational trip, let us analyse these Anglo-Saxon cultures by asking the following questions: What are the demographical, economical, technological, architectural, academic, religious, social and behavioural characteristics of these Anglo-Saxon cultures? How can we relate those characteristics to our own culture? How do we see these Anglo-Saxon cultures at the end?

If you want to share your answers, you can submit them by filling in the following form:


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