Nghiên cứu về việc xử lý các khía cạnh liên văn hóa trong lớp học tiếng anh của giáo viên ở trường chuyên hạ long

THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES LE THI NGA A STUDY ON HA LONG GIFTED HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHERS’ ADDRESSING OF INTERCULTURAL ASPECTS IN THEIR CLASSES (Nghiên cứu việc xử lý khía cạnh liên văn hóa lớp học tiếng Anh giáo viên Trường Chuyên Hạ Long) M.A THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201 THAI NGUYEN – 2019 ATTESTATION OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby declare that this submission of the minor thesis entitled “ A study on Ha Long gifted high school English teachers’ addressing of intercultural aspects in their classes” is my own work To the best of my knowledge, it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at SFL or any other educational institutions The thesis has not been submitted to any other examining body and has not been published Any contribution made to the research by others is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis Thai Nguyen, July 2019 Le Thi Nga Approved by SUPERVISOR Dr Nguyen Thi Hang i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This thesis could not have been accomplished without the help and support from a number of people First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere thanks and my deepest gratitude towards Dr Nguyen Thi Hang, my supervisor, for her thorough instruction, precious guidance and ideas and constant encouragement from the first day of working out the outline for the research to the last days of writing up the thesis Without her invaluable support, this graduation paper would not have been completed My special thanks are also sent to my colleagues and my beloved students at Ha Long high school for gifted students for their enthusiastic participation in my study Their devoted and sincere contribution helped shape the validity and reliability of this study Last but not least, I owe a great debt of gratitude towards my family and my friends for their endless care, support and faith in me Thai Nguyen, July 2019 Le Thi Nga ii ABSTRACT This study examines the practice of teaching culture among English teachers at high school in Vietnam with practical experience in English as a foreign language It focuses on the forms of intercultural learning provided by teachers and teachers’ utility of culture input to develop students’ intercultural competence Teachers of English at Ha Long high school for gifted students are considered a cultural group, which is the reason for me to apply an ethnographic method in the study The data for analysis is collected from two sources: class observations and postobservation interviews with the teacher participants The findings show that culture teaching is now integrated closely with linguistic competence in the curriculum The teachers exploit different forms of intercultural learning to provide students with intercultural knowledge, among which project-based learning activity, discussion on cultural differences and role plays are of extreme preference, enabling students to self-discover the culture aspects assigned Noticeably, most of those forms are based on the input available in the set English textbook Teachers had little opportunity to use supplementary material In the practice of culture teaching, the factors preventing both students and teachers from achieving their culture-intaking were also explained, among which time constraint was the key reason Based on the findings of the study, recommendations are provided for both English teachers and educational administrator for improving the quality and quantity of culture teaching at high schools in Vietnam iii TABLE OF CONTENT CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction .1 1.2 Rationale 1.3 Aims of the study 1.4 Research questions 1.5 Significance of the study 1.6 Scope of the study .5 1.7 Design of the study CHAPTER LITERATURE REVIEW .6 2.1 Conceptualisations of culture 2.2 Culture in language education 2.2.1 Relationship between language and culture 2.2.2 Intercultural competence .8 2.3 Cultural content in language teaching materials .9 2.4 Previous studies of IC teaching .10 CHAPTER METHODOLOGY 13 3.1 Ethnography 13 3.2 Field site and participants 14 3.3 Data collection procedure .16 3.3.1 Classroom observation .16 3.3.2 Semi-structured interviews 17 Data analysis 19 3.4.1 Step 19 3.4.2 Step 20 3.4.3 Step 20 47 CHAPTER FINDINGS 21 AND DISCUSSION 4.1 Forms of intercultural learning provided by the teachers .21 4.1.1 Project-based learning .22 4.1.2 Discussion on cultural differences .25 4.1.3 27 4.2 Teachers’ utility competence 30 of culture input to develop Role-play students’ intercultural 4.2.1 Teachers’ use of set teaching materials .31 4.2.2 Teachers’ use of supplementary culture input .36 4.3 Summary 40 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION 41 5.1 Summary of 41 5.1.1 Forms of intercultural 41 learning the provided findings by the teachers 5.1.2 Teacher’s utility of culture input 42 5.2 Recommendations for more effective integration of culture into English lessons 42 5.2.1 Physical dimension .42 5.2.2 Professional dimension 43 5.2.3 Providing teachers with more professional support 43 5.3 Limitations of the study 44 5.4 Suggestions for 44 further study 5.5 Conclusion .45 REFERENCES .4 APPENDICES I APPENDIX 1: CLASS OBSERVATION SHEET I APPENDIX 2: THE INTERVIEW GUIDE II 68 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS EFL: English as a foreign language IC: Intercultural competence ICC: Intercultural communicative competence MOET: Ministry of Education and Training vi LIST OF TABLES` Table 3.1: Demographic information about participants …………………………… 16 Table 1: Summary of intercultural learning forms…………………… … 22 Table 2: Summary of project-based learning activities……………… ………… 23 Table 3: Summary of discussion activities…………………………… ………… 27 Table 4: Summary of role-play activities…………………… ………………… 29 Table 5: Summary of how culture input utilized………………… …………… 32 Table 6: Culture input provided in set teaching materials……………… ……… 36 vii 10 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction self-research, work at home in groups, in pairs to complete a project Also, it would enable EFL teachers to present 69 students with aspects of cultural content and perform other tasks such as roleplays, dramas, etc 5.2.2 Professional dimension In a class observation, I noticed that when the teacher led in to the topic by sharing her own experience in deciding a career in Canada – the country she studied for Master degree, the students got completely interested They also asked a lot of questions about this real-life story with excitement That means the teacher themselves can be an interesting and reliable source of culture knowledge if they equip themselves with the skills, knowledge, and ability to take the role of the cultural mediators In order to accomplish their mission, EFL teachers should:  atend regular IC workshops, seminars and training courses to develop them to be a conscious, devoted and ideal language-and-culture teacher  observe their colleagues’ class, not only to evaluate but also to share problems, solutions, knowledge and experience  build up more interesting supplemental activities besides the tasks available in textbooks To keep students motivated and deepen their understanding of certain cultural aspects, teachers need to be flexible in adopting and adapting the activities in textbooks and try to design more exciting outside- textbook activities  enhance their skills of using technology in classroom to create more vivid and inspiring lessons  make full use of the internet which provide a various source of authentic cultural materials such as movies, songs, articles, news, fairy tales, folklores, pictures, etc 5.2.3 Providing teachers with more professional support To lead the objective of developing of learners’ intercultural communication competence to success, teachers need a lot of professional help from MOET Firstly, teachers should be provided with more supplementary materials relating to the new textbook being taught Secondly, training courses delivered by well- qualified and leading language experts are necessary for every teacher who is struggling to find efective approaches to foster students’ intercultural communication ability Such training is vital to create room for language teachers to discuss and share their teaching experience in addressing cultural aspects in foreign 70 language class Thirdly, it is advised that more and more qualified teachers should be sent to study abroad or encouraged to participate in teacher exchange programs abroad It is the 71 excellent opportunity to share ideas and knowledge, as well as learn about educational practices from diferent countries The first-hand experience of living and working in different cultures will help teachers to broaden their cultural knowledge and enhance cultural sensitivity as well as competence 5.3 Limitations of the study Although the researcher has made every efort to ofer some interesting findings, like other studies there are some limitations Firstly, this is a modest study with limited number of subjects The researcher observed only ten classes and five teachers of English took part in the interviews The study was small-scaled one in the sense that it only focuses on teachers and students in one school coded Ha Long high school for gifted students therefore may not be representative of the general group or population Secondly, the classroom observations, in a sense, help to provide useful information of how observed teachers address cultural aspects in their class Nevertheless, these observations were not frequent and what the researcher saw in the classroom may not true to what was really going on in the classroom The observed teachers may teach diferently to get convinced demonstration for fear of negative evaluation from the observer Being aware of these problems during the observations the researcher tried to minimize their impacts though they cannot totally eliminate Finally, at the time the study was conducted all the three graders 10th, 11th, 12thhad used the innovative English textbooks Tieng Anh Thi Diem, but the researcher was just able to focus on the cultural content of the Experimental English textbook for grade 12 However, I believe that the gap that my paper has not covered will be fulfilled by other studies in the future 5.4 Suggestions for further study On the basis of the findings and limitations of the study, the following suggestions are made for further research As mentioned before, further research needs to be carried out to investigate more deeply into the topic Moreover, this study only focuses on cultural content 72 presented in Tieng Anh Thi Diem 12 and the 12th graders; more study should be on the cultural content in Tieng Anh Thi Diem 10 and 12 as well as the 10th, 11th graders In a further study, it is suggested that interview questions should be distributed to a large 73 numbers of participants so that findings are more generalized In order to be able to generalize the findings, a larger sample of schools need to be included and this require a larger scale research study Finally, the case as well as the scope of the study, as indicated above is a limitation of the study which needs much more attention on in further studies It would be interesting to conduct a similar study in another single case and the scope would be broadened to all of the new series of innovative textbooks 5.5 Conclusion This research obviously does not allow us to generalize, but it is important to note the following insights gained from the study of Ha Long gifted high school teachers’ addressing of cultural aspects in their classes The participating teachers showed evidence of some conscious eforts – with varying degrees of success in their implementation – to incorporate the intercultural dimension during their teaching practice as well It turns out that Tieng Anh Thi Diem 12 helps to raise students’ cultural awareness but due to some subjective reasons, it, in 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In M Byram & P Grundy (Eds.), Context and culture in language teaching and learning (pp 72-80) Tonawanda, NY: Multilingual Matters Walford, G.(2008) The nature of educational ethnography In G Walford (Ed), How to educational ethnography (pp.1-15) London, The United Kingdom: The Tufnell Press Wang, J (2011) Culture Diferences and English Teaching English Language Teaching, 4(2), 223-230 Zhang, H (2007) Intercultural approach to foreign language teaching: 上上: 上上上 上上上上上上 81 APPENDICES APPENDIX 1: CLASS OBSERVATION SHEET Date: Teacher’s name: Class: Lesson content: Activities Forms of Culture Students’ intercultural input level of learning involvement I Other notes APPENDIX 2: THE INTERVIEW GUIDE Date : …………………………………………………………………….…………… Teacher’s name: …………………………………………………………………… Main questions Possible probes Q1 How important you think  Is it important to integrating culture into culture is in language learning and teaching? English teaching?  How often you teach cultural knowledge to your students?  Do you have any dificulties in incorporating culture in English lessons? Q2 How you exploit culture input to teach culture?  Teaching materials? Ready-made and commercially available? Developing it by yourself? Sharing with your colleagues?  Sources: textbook/internet/personal cultural accumulated knowledge…  Is the textbook “Tieng Anh thi diem 12” the main resource for teaching culture?  How you exploit the textbook to teach culture to your students?  Besides the textbook, what other sources or materials you utilize to teach culture? Q3 What forms of inter-cultural  What activities you use to teach culture to learning you provide for your students? your students?  Among these activities, which one you find the most efective in developing your students’ intercultural competence? Why? II ... Ha Long gifted high school English teachers’ addressing of intercultural aspects in their classes.” 1.3 Aims of the study This study is aimed at exploring how the teachers of English at Ha Long. .. 12th grade students at Ha Long high school for gifted students in the academic year 2018-2019 The study focuses on the reality of teaching and learning English at Ha Long high school for gifted... utility of culture input to develop students’ intercultural competence Teachers of English at Ha Long high school for gifted students are considered a cultural group, which is the reason for me