Newspaper: Vehicles for Teaching ESOL with A Cultural Focus

Charles H. Blatchford
Most of ESOL teachers use newspaper as resource for variety, contemporaneity, or relevance that can be used in ESOL, however, but to better effect if the emphasis is shifted from language teaching to an acknowledged and over focus on culture. Based on Henry Steele Commager (1970:161), the definition of newspaper is a bundle of patterns of behavior, habits of conduct, customs, laws beliefs, and instinctive responses that are displayed by a society. The funtion of this report of the ideas that worked in the workshop and some of notions I learned not to take for granted are: 1. Ann Landers/Dear Abby. Many English teachers have used this feature to pose a problem; they then ask students to supply answer which can be compared with Anns. with the focus on culture, however, it is the topics that Anns readers submit that are of most interest. 2. The horoscope 3. The front page 4. Commentators and columnist 5. Classified 6. Miss Fixit 7. Letters to the editor These features or the bridge column or the crossword puzzle are some of the features a reader might turn to first. But there are many others cultural indicators which can fruitfully be discussed. Cartoons: Jib Fowles article (1970), caricature, graph and charts, and advertising. In order to include as many answer as possible to who, what, when, where, why and how in the lead paragraph, journalists may use appositives. Within any newspaper is a variety of styles and here is the very formal editorial, the argument of the new analysis, the slang or the sarcasm in a letter to the editor, the elliptical phrasing of some columnists, the truncated style of the headline, the dialect of comic strip.

So far, the discussion has noticeably omitted the news; with culture in mind, wire service news stories seem to be of least relevance as they do not reveal anything unique about our culture.

A disadvantage of starting off with news in the newspaper is that it often does not spark much discussion and new usually leads to the teachers interpretation of events and consequent lack of involvement on the part of the students.

An alternative way to approach news, however, is to work on the assumption that students know what it is and assign them a task of writing some news. A more appropriate task might have been an in-class decision on the single word that might best capture a lead paragraph. A newspaper is fresh daily; when you use ESOL, use that days paper to get the most out of there source; dont ask students to keep bringing it back day after day. A few other dos and donts. 1. Dont try to cover the whole paper each day; select just one or two features. 2. Dont get stuck on headlines. 3. Each time you use the paper, select another type feature. 4. Take a good dictionary to class with you. 5. Let each student have his own newspaper. 6. If you have an overhead projector, you can focus students attention on a certain point you want to discuss.

An Argument for Culture Analysis in the Second Language Classroom

George H. Hughes University of Kansas
The Focus on Culture Study To make this point clear, the types of questions which deal with needs, motives, desires, and purposes can be referred to as individual or psychological questions; 1. Those which inquire into ideas 2. Beliefs 3. Customs 4. Forms of organization can be called institutional questions Models for the analysis of culture Brooks Key Questions Brooks suggests that when observing and studying a culture it is important to have key questions in mind that this helps promote systematic observation. The sample list of questions that serve to highlight the individual aspects of culture: 1. How do you think and feel about your family? 2. How do you tell right from wrong? 3. How do you appear in public? 4. How do you act toward a strange? 5. How do you treat a guest? 6. How do you view the opposite sex? 7. How do answer a childs question about God, birth, sex, and myth? 8. How do you look upon minority group? 9. What are you superstitious about? 10. What is your greatest ambition, you chief regret? 11. Of what organization are you a member?

 Contrast these with the following sample which represents the type of questions that Brooks distinguishes as being of the institutional kind: 1. What school and colleges can you go to? 2. Under what system of government do you live? 3. What laws must you obey? Who makes them? 4. What churches or religious organization may you join? 5. What publications can you buy? 6. What is the money system you use? 7. How do you get from place to place? 8. What must you obtain a license for? 9. What public recreational facilities are available to you? 10. For what do you get your name in the papers? 11. What military organization may you or must serve in? Murdocks Seven Facets George Murdock bases his classification on the assumption that any element of culture may have facets upon which to be classified: 1. A patterned activity, that is A customary norm of motor, verbal or implicit (covert or ideational) behavior. 2. The appropriateness of such an activity under certain circumstances such as time or place. 3. The particular subject of the behavior 4. The object toward which the behavior is directed 5. Some mean external to both the subject and the object of the behavior 6. The purpose of the activity 7. The result of the activity. Halls Ten Primary Message System The criteria upon which these ten forms of human activity were chosen are the following: 1. Rooted in a biological activity widely shared with other advanced living forms. 2. Capable of analysis in its own terms without reference to the other system and so organized that it contains isolated components that can be built up into more complex units.

3. So constituted that it reflects all the rest of culture and is reflected in the rest of culture. The Primary Message System are: 1. Interaction. 2. Association. 3. Subsistence. 4. Bisexuality 5. Territoriality. 6. Temporality. 7. Learning. 8. Play 9. Defense. 10. Exploitation. Taylor and Sorensons Model Darrel Taylor and John Sorenson (1961: 351) propose a model on which to base culture capsule, so that while analyzing one element at a time, the student eventually derives a unified picture. Technological category 1. Foot-getting and using (cultivating and the major crops; preparing, serving, and eating typical food). 2. Shelter-Housing (the patio form. Barred windows, fronting on street) 3. Clothing 4. Tools 5. Transportation Nostrands Emergent Model Nostrand looks for patterns in the feeling, beliefs, and though process of members of the target culture. Nostrand based his model on four levels of societal organization: 1. The human organism (personality) 2. social relations 3. culture pattern and ecology.

 Each culture has its own themes and no culture has no more than twelve. The twelve themes of French culture, according to Nostrand (1974), are the following: 1. The art of living : enjoyment of the lifestyle one has chosen. 2. Intellectuality and etre raisonnable 3. individualism and civil liberty (including acquisitive ambition) 4. realism and good sense (including health care and sensitivity to material conditions and conveniences) 5. law and order (including retributive justice) 6. distributive justice (including an increasing humanitarian concern and sensitivity to the deteriorating environment) 7. Friendship 8. Love 9. Family 10. Religion 11. The quest for community (with a subculture), and loyalty to a province or region) 12. Patriotism and its object, la patrie In conclusion, models for the analysis of culture offer an opportunity for culture study to proceed in: 1. A systematic 2. Comparative. 3. Comprehensive manner. Models are consistent designs that allow for the incorporation of new and changing data. But models that present an empty taxonomy-those which need to be filled in for each culture- are of little use unless the language teacher has acquired an orientation to the concepts and process involved. Technique for Teaching Cultural Awareness Only a very brief sketch can be included here of those deemed most practical. 1. Comparison method. 2. Culture assimilation. 3. Culture capsule. 4. Drama. 5. Audiomotor unit or Total Physical Response. 6. Newspaper projected media and the culture island.