Multicultural Language Teaching

Over the last few years culture has become an increasingly essential component of language teaching. My aim throughout this project is to create a didactic unit regarding the implementation of culture, society and art in English in a secondary school Spanish context. Spanish students conceive English as a mere subject in high schools. They all are trained to pass their grammar exams in order to get a certificate, but seldom do they acquire a sense of culture awareness, communicative skills and practice the language in context. Being this spectrum a distant second, students are led to failure in real context. Echevarria and Graves assert that:

Effective language learning takes place in well-organized classrooms where there are opportunities

According to J. A Thomas, “Meaning is not something which is inherent in the words alone, nor is it produced by the speaker alone, nor by the hearer alone. Making meaning is a dynamic process” (1995: 22). What it is indicated by Thomas is that language consists on several internal factors than just words and grammar structures. Meaning is determined by the speaker’s intention as well as interpretation. It is undeniable that meaning is directly connected to context and context is remarkably based on culture. As we can see, pragmatics (the study of language in context) plays an essential role in language communication. Likewise Professor J. Cummins, language and its comprehension is undoubtedly linked to interpersonal cues, such as intonation, gestures, and facial expressions (1994). That is why it is necessary an awareness of culture target in teaching a language. Teaching English as a foreign language is as important as teaching the culture of the English-speaking countries. Brown, cited in Jiang, asserts

Additionally, this thesis will contemplate other parameters such as the methodology gained, language and culture as well as possible shortcomings. Furthermore, a didactic unit is presented so as to be applied, taking into consideration characteristics of the group, the conditions of the high school, the contextualization of the city, class, students, resources employed (exposed in the following point: Contextualization) as well as the skills and theories treated both in and out of the classroom. For example, not only will it be developed a serie of tasks that might enrich students’ knowledge of the English culture and society, but art as well. Literature, music and painting would be directly connected to reading, writing, listening and speaking. Likewise, cooperative learning techniques and the multiple intelligence theory will be born in mind while designing these specific assignments. As D.W. Johnson and R.T. Johnson emphasises in “Cooperative Learning”, our students will be divided into small groups so that students work together to maximize their learning and teacher will work as a guide. Regarding Howard Gardner 's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, several assignments will be created to develop different modalities of intelligence. As it has been explained before, the reason why we