The Impact on Teachers of Language Variation as a Course Component
RESULTS
Cross-Cultural Communication
On cross-cultural communication, the most generally popular topic, some representative comments are:
1. Teaching EFL ‘is’ cross-culture and being made aware of culture-laden meanings to which the teacher is unconscious is valuable.
2. Often when students are learning / speaking, they are only aware of the dictionary meanings of the words etc, but speaking involves much more than just words - there are messages that go beyond the spoken/written word - i.e. nuances, feelings etc. These are important for students and teachers to be aware of - and students are interested in this too!
3. A classroom with a native speaker teacher is indeed a strong cross-cultural situation. I team-teach with one, and frequently feel the need for this field of knowledge. And, learning a foreign language is a cross-cultural experience. It’s one of the most useful sub topic in the module. (Non-native speaker of English).
4. It helped me explain some of the breakdowns I have had in communication that I couldn’t understand before (Native speaker of English).
Although most of these comments do not give concrete examples of how the topic has proved relevant or useful, we can see that for these teachers, it is not only an enriched view of language that has been gained (comments 1 and 2), but also that this knowledge has been of direct use in the teachers’ own private and professional interactions (comments 3 and 4).
