Fostering students’ awareness of preserving ethnic cultural identity after learning “part a - Unit 2: cultural diversity - English 12”: a case study in bac son high school

THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
BAC SON HIGH SCHOOL
----------------------------
EXPERIENCE INNOVATION
FOSTERING STUDENTS’ AWARENESS OF PRESERVING ETHNIC CULTURAL IDENTITY AFTER LEARNING 
“PART A - UNIT 2: CULTURAL DIVERSITY- ENGLISH 12”:
A CASE STUDY IN BAC SON HIGH SCHOOL 
Writer: Triệu Thị Đào
Position: Teacher
Topic in the fields of: English
THANH HOA, 2019
INDEX
CONTENT
Page
A. INTRODUCTION 
2
I. Reasons to choose the theme 
2
II. Aims of the research
2
III. Subjective of the research 
3
IV. Methodology of the research
3
B. CONTENTS 
4
I. Theoretical basis of the research
4
I.1. Definitions of culture
4
I.2. What is cultural diversity?
6
I.3. What is the importance of cultural diversity?
6
II. Reality of the study
8
III. Solution
8
PART A: 
A brief note on Vietnamese Cultures and Traditions in comparison with other cultures
8
PART B: Students’ discussions and presentations
14
IV. Effectiveness of the research
C. CONCLUSION 
20
21
1. Conclusion
21
2. Proposal 
21
REFERENCE 
22
APPENDIX
24
A. INTRODUCTION
I. Reasons to choose the theme
	According to Adam Gopnik, an American writer “We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.” And English may not be the most spoken language in the world, but it is the official language of 53 countries and spoken by around 400 million people across the globe. Being able to speak English is not just about being able to communicate with native English speakers, it is the most common second language in the world. That is why knowing English is a must in our modern world.
	However, learning a foreign language means more than just mastering its grammar, vocabulary and phonology. 21st century society crosses borders confidently, each new day exploring the most hidden parts of our planet and bringing changes even into the class. Successful cross-cultural communication requires culturally aware communicators, those who respond appropriately in a given social context, show empathy, tolerance and openness towards other communicators. Teaching a foreign language means preparing your students for real-life situations they are likely to encounter while visiting London, Tokyo or New York for example in order to avoid being misunderstood, embarrassed or excluded from communication. The goal of language education is not native speaker competence in target language. Rather, it is developing intercultural communicative competence in students through culture incorporation. [11].
	In this world of integration, people and especially the young absorb new languages as well as new cultures rapidly. Consequently, they in some cases have lost their national identity. This is also a matter of students in Bac Son High School, where I am teaching English. Most students in our school are ethnic minorities and have low living standard. Therefore, some of their traditional customs have gradually been lost as a result of globalization and industrialization.
	In my capacity as a teacher, I am deeply aware of my responsibilities in orienting my students to acquire new cultures correctly and simultaneously preserve and bring into play their ethnic cultural identity. Because of this reason, I have decided to do this research named: Fostering students’ awareness of preserving ethnic cultural identity after learning Part A – Unit 2: Cultural Diversity – English 12: A case study in Bac Son High School. 
II. Aims of the research	
I have been working as an English teacher for more than ten years and grown fond of the work. I incessantly make every effort to improve the standard of teaching and learning English in my school. Moreover, I believe that teaching English is not just teaching a language, it is teaching about people and their cultures. In the recent years, my attempts have been reciprocated little by little. Be aware of my responsibility for requirements of the Department of Education and Training combining the reality of my students to English learning, I carried out my study with three main aims:
- To help my students have correct consciousness of cultural diversity and build sense of ethnic cultural identity.
- To provide some pedagogical suggestions for teachers to teach the related lesson effectively and have connection to the school students in reality.
III. Subjective of the research
The total participants were 73 students from two twelve grades (12A1 and 12A2) in Bac Son high school, which is situated in Ngoc Lac, a mountainous district in Thanh Hoa province. Out of the 73 participants, there are 21 male students (28.8%) and 52 female ones (71.2%) participating in the study. The state of unbalance of gender percentage is caused by some of reasons of which males at late teenager are regarded as main employees in their families, they therefore, abolish their schooling and earn living. More specially, the number of Muong students (90.5%) is overwhelming to the amount of Kinh students (8.2%) and Dao students(1.3%). This disproportion is unsurprising as the fact that Bac Son school is situated in a mountainous area where a vast majority of the inhabitants are Muong ethnics. The majority of these students come from disadvantageous families with the under medium level of living standard and learning condition as well. Consequently, these students’ motivation of studying is remarkable limited due to the burden of subsistence. Unfortunately, their English proficiency is almost either at the beginning level or at A1 level although they have been learning English for more than four years, since they were sixth grade students.
IV. Methodology of the research	
To make my solutions effectively, I have used some following methods.
 	Firstly, I always get advices from colleagues through co-working.	
 	Secondly, I usually study, create and use new methods in teaching English such as using images, pictures, posters, real objects, etc
- Pictures of Ao Dai (traditional costume of Vietnamese women)
- Images of wedding ceremony in Vietnam 
- Photos of wedding ceremony and other traditional festivals and customs of Muong ethnic minority and Dao ethnic minority.
 	Thirdly, I apply science and technology in teaching, use projecters, presents films, video clips to make the lesson actively. For example, I show a short film about wedding ceremony of Dao ethnic group before the lesson to motivate the spirit of studying between students. 
 	Lastly, I classify students into groups to discuss about their own cultures (Kinh, Muong, Dao). Then, I introduce the representatives of each group to tell about their ethnic cultures such as food, costume, festival, wedding, funeral.etc.
B. CONTENTS.
I. Theoretical basis of the research
I.1. Definitions of cultures
	Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define. In 1952, the American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164 different definitions. Apte (1994: 2001), writing in the ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, summarized the problem as follows: ‘Despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there was in the early 1990s no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature.’ 
	The following extract from Avruch provides an historical perspective to some of the ways in which the term has been interpreted: 
 	Much of the difficulty [of understanding the concept of culture] stems from the different usages of the term as it was increasingly employed in the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, it was used in three ways (all of which can be found today as well). First, as exemplified in Matthew Arnolds’ Culture and Anarchy (1867), culture referred to special intellectual or artistic endeavors or products, what today we might call “high culture” as opposed to “popular culture” (or “folkways” in an earlier usage). By this definition, only a portion – typically a small one – of any social group “has” culture. (The rest are potential sources of anarchy!) This sense of culture is more closely related to aesthetics than to social science. 
 	Partly in reaction to this usage, the second, as pioneered by Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870), referred to a quality possessed by all people in all social groups, who nevertheless could be arrayed on a development (evolutionary) continuum (in Lewis Henry Morgan’s scheme) from “savagery” through “barbarism” to “civilization”. It is worth quoting Tylor’s definition in its entirety; first because it became the foundational one for anthropology; and second because it partly explains why Kroeber and Kluckhohn found definitional fecundity by the early 1950s. Tylor’s definition of culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. In contrast to Arnold’s view, all folks “have” culture, which they acquire by virtue of membership in some social group – society. And a whole grab bag of things, from knowledge to habits to capabilities, makes up culture. 
 	The extreme inclusivity of Tylor’s definition stayed with anthropology a long time; it is one reason political scientists who became interested in cultural questions in the late 1950s felt it necessary to delimit their relevant cultural domain to “political culture”. But the greatest legacy of Tylor’s definition lay in his “complex whole” formulation. This was accepted even by those later anthropologists who forcefully rejected his evolutionism. They took it to mean that cultures were wholes – integrated systems. Although this assertion has great heuristic value, it also, as we shall argue below, simplifies the world considerably. 
 	The third and last usage of culture developed in anthropology in the twentieth-century work of Franz Boas and his students, though with roots in the eighteenth-century writings of Johann von Herder. As Tylor reacted to Arnold to establish a scientific (rather than aesthetic) basis for culture, so Boas reacted against Tylor and other social evolutionists. Whereas the evolutionists stressed the universal character of a single culture, with different societies arrayed from savage to civilized, Boas emphasized the uniqueness of the many and varied cultures of different peoples or societies. Moreover he dismissed the value judgments he found inherent in both the Arnoldian and Tylorean views of culture; for Boas, one should never differentiate high from low culture, and one ought not differentially valorize cultures as savage or civilized. 
 	Here, then, are three very different understandings of culture. Part of the difficulty in the term lies in its multiple meanings. But to compound matters, the difficulties are not merely conceptual or semantic. All of the usages and understandings come attached to, or Core Concepts 2 What is Culture? Spencer-Oatey 2012 can be attached to, different political or ideological agendas that, in one form or another, still resonate today. 
 	Some other definitions of cultures according to some famous linguists:
 	‘Culture ... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ 
	 Tyler (British anthropologist) 1870: 1; cited by Avruch 1998: 6 
 	‘Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as conditional elements of future action.’ 
	Kroeber & Kluckhohn 1952: 181; cited by Adler 1997: 14 
 	‘Culture consists of the derivatives of experience, more or less organized, learned or created by the individuals of a population, including those images or encodements and their interpretations (meanings) transmitted from past generations, from contemporaries, or formed by individuals themselves.’ 	T.Schwartz 1992; cited by Avruch 1998: 17 
 	‘[Culture] is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.’ 
	Hofstede 1994: 5 
 	‘... the set of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people, but different for each individual, communicated from one generation to the next.’ 
	Matsumoto 1996: 16 
 	‘Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behaviour and his/her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour.’ 
	 Spencer-Oatey 2008: 3
I.2. What Is Cultural Diversity?
	According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_diversity, Cultural diversity is the quality of diverse or different cultures, as opposed to  monoculture, the global monoculture, or a homogenization of cultures, akin to cultural decay. The phrase cultural diversity can also refer to having different cultures respect each other's differences. The phrase "cultural diversity" is also sometimes used to mean the variety of human societies or cultures in a specific region, or in the world as a whole. Globalization is often said to have a negative effect on the world's cultural diversity.
I.3. What is the importance of cultural diversity?
	Cultural diversity is not only important but critical in our education today and all schools say that they are preparing students for the future and that they are preparing them for the bigger world. When students leave their neighborhoods and go off to college or go out in the workaday world, they are not going to find just one culture there. They are not going to find one way of thinking, one way of problem solving. They are going to find richness out there, that if they are not prepared for it, they are going to have a hard time. They are going to have a hard time in their education and in their workaday world but if we can want to ask ourselves what kind of a world do we want to live in. 
	Paul Cummins, PhD, President and CEO 	 of Coalition for Engaged Education (CEE)
	Cultural diversity is needed in schools because of the following reasons:
Promotes Student Growth & Reflection
This is probably the biggest benefit of discussing or experiencing diversity in the classroom. When students learn about other groups’ struggles, perspectives, and experiences, they tend to reflect on and respond to that information. They are likely to ask themselves several questions that encourage personal growth: Would I act that way in a similar situation? Have I looked down on someone because of their race, gender, or other uncontrollable factors? Do I believe certain racial or gender-based stereotypes that are limiting my influence or making me appear judgmental? When honest, open-ended discussions about diversity occur within the classroom, teachers can facilitate productive conversation and embrace teachable moments to help promote personal growth in each student.
Fosters a Sense of Empathy and Awareness
Simply being aware of an issue isn’t always enough to bring about empathy. But when that “issue” is connected to names and faces of fellow students, awareness turns to empathy and a true desire to understand a new point of view. Allowing students to hear about real struggles or negative experiences dealing with race or culture will help them to understand more about the challenge some people face with diversity, or a lack thereof. At the same time, in schools that are not particularly diverse, bringing awareness to the importance of diversity and allowing students to see another perspective will prompt them to realize there is a large world beyond their small classroom, and they will be able to empathize more with people who are different than them.
Brings About Open-Mindedness and New Perspectives
It’s easy to remain in a bubble of your own thoughts and opinions, especially when you’re a young student. But when diversity is not only present, but also discussed, it brings about a great deal of new perspectives that generally leads to more open-mindedness. When a person has a respectful conversation with another person who has a very different point of view, their eyes are often opened to new ideas and new thoughts. When students can face situations by thinking of varying perspectives on that situation, they will experience great personal development and a new way of approaching the world.
Supports Mindfulness and Tolerance
Children who grow up around those of other races, ethnicities, or cultures are usually very willing to embrace a new culture, a new mindset, or a new perspective. But for children who don’t experience diversity from a young age, they often have to learn how to be mindful and tolerant of others in diverse situations, as well as understand that not everyone is the same as them. Having a diverse classroom and having quality conversations about diversity can support mindfulness and tolerance in just about any student.
Allows Students to Feel Unique, Yet Part of a Group
This point applies especially when diversity within the classroom itself is explored, discussed, and celebrated. As teachers, we know that every student is unique and an individual. But students often feel grouped—they’re one of the smart kids, they’re on the football team, or they’re so-and-so’s sibling— and therefore not unique. Even with diversity, the same happens. Allow students to explore their individual diversity, from their country of ethnicity all the way down to their immediate family. It will show students that we are, in fact, all a part of large, meaningful groups, but we also have individual characteristics and experiences that make us all individual and unique.
Prepares Students for Diversity in the Workplace
Regardless of the diversity of a school or a town, students can rest assured that they will indeed come face to face with diversity in the workplace. Once employed, whether at a fast-food restaurant or a Fortune 500 company, students will have to interact with those from different backgrounds—both racially and culturally— on a daily basis. In the world of business, intolerance and ignorance are simply unacceptable, and each employee of every company is expected to behave appropriately and act maturely in all situations, including those where diversity is involved. Having conversations about diversity and exposing students to diversity at an early age will benefit them significantly when they enter the workplace, as they will already be tolerant, understanding, and open-minded about differences in people.
School Is About Preparing Kids for Life—Not Just the Next School
With state standards, test grades, and report cards constantly on a teacher’s mind, it can be easy to focus solely on preparing your students for the next grade or the next school. But good teachers know that teaching is more than just that—it’s about preparing students to become well-rounded and educated adults. We all want our students to grow up and to be successful. However, money and fame are not the only means of success when it comes to education. Parents and teachers alike constantly strive to mold and shape their kids into the best versions of themselves, prepared to take on the world with understanding, empathy, and love. Encouraging kids to talk about and embrace diversity from a young age fosters those characteristics, and allows students to be more successful in life, not just as a businessman or woman, but as a human being who is kind to others and respectful of people’s differences.
	(https://www.teachtci.com/the-importance-of-diversity-in-the-classroom/