November 17 post

The chapter on ensuring social relevance was very interesting. I personally liked the activity 11.1 “Tapping Human Resources” because this is something that I think I could potentially struggle with when I become a teacher. I believe that I am familiar enough with electronics, but actually making that bridge between by students L1 and L2 is a bit more intimidating to me (likely because I will not know their L1). I think that the ideas to make out lists using these questions is a good one and will not only create a bridge between L1 and L2, but create a bridge to using the media for classroom activities. I also really enjoyed the section about standardization. This made me think about my students at the ELI who work so incredibly hard on pronunciation and find it to be so important. If they do not say a word like me, they work and work until they do. I try and express to them that accents are okay, and if they went to another state they will pronounce words completely different. This would likely be very problematic for my students if they ever moved out of Illinois. I do not mean problematic as in no one would understand them, but I think they would be confused by others and likely think that they were saying different words. Obviously we need to teach our students pronunciation so they can be understood, but this is something to also consider and at the very least mention to more advanced students, or students who plan to travel. Lastly, and as a side note, I thought the statistics about English were very interesting. 80 percent of home pages on the World Wide Web use English? I had no idea!

Kuma’s Chapter 12 well also more interesting than I had expected based on the title “Raising Cultural Consciousness.” I thought the section on critical cultural consciousness was interesting because it put into perspective what globalization is actually changing in our world. It is shrinking our space, time, and helping borders disappear. I absolutely agree with this, and it got me thinking about how still, even with this always increasing closeness, we still are not really aware of other cultures. Even I, who studies language and culture and travel, am not nearly as conscious as I could be of this closeness between cultures. I think that we lose sight of just how powerful the Internet is. Furthermore, my favorite quote in this chapter was “in understanding other cultures, we understand our own better; in understanding our own, we understand other cultures better. Therein lies real and meaningful cultural growth” (273). Just as the chapter says, there is no one culture that is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. We need to take advantage of this closeness that the Internet gives us and begin to grow in this way. I think that simply by choosing to get our TESOL endorsements we are on the right track, but we need to spread the word and get others thinking in these terms as well.