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Teach English in Songjia Zhen - Ankang Shi

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Culture clash in the classroom between two students, or between the teacher and a student, can cause major problems in the learning progress of a class. A person’s culture is something that has a huge influence on things like their values, upbringing and even personality, so it is no surprise that when a person feels an aspect of their culture has been ignored or insulted they may react quite negatively. “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots” - Marcus Garvey. When teaching a class to a group of students of an unfamiliar culture it is generally best to avoid the topics of politics or religion altogether. While just avoiding certain topics makes a huge difference in a teachers risk of offending students, there are many more things to consider. One of the easiest ways to accidentally offend students is by not being conscious of one’s body language. For example East Asian students find pointing to be extremely offensive and rude, but to a Western student pointing is just a normal and inoffensive gesture. This example highlights how incredibly easy it is to make a simple mistake when teaching and cause a lot of negativity and tension in the class. Closely related to body language is eye contact, eye contact means something completely different among different cultures. In Western culture for example when two people talk, it doesn’t matter how young or old the individuals are, eye contact is held for about seventy percent of the conversation. In many African cultures making prolonged eye contact with a superior, who is the teacher in this situation, is considered very rude. Another example is that in South-East Asian cultures correcting a superior or telling them information is not typically done. There has been speculation that many of the plane crashes that have happened around Asia are actually because the co-pilot is not actually able to take control or alert the pilot when they see an error. This has an obvious effect on the classroom dynamic. While the teacher isn’t technically required to research the culture of every student before teaching them, it is still the teacher’s responsibility to effectively teach English, and offending the students compromises this. To avoid many problems the teacher can simply do some preparatory background research, especially if the teacher has just started a job in a new country. While there is much one can do as a teacher to avoid culture class, there is still potential student to student clashing that can happen. While this can be difficult to manage, the best a teacher can do is simply seat students who are likely to clash further away from each other, and create a classroom environment that is both respectful, and obedient to the teacher. With this classroom dynamic even if there is clashing the teacher can always reign the students in and restore order. In conclusion, culture clash is something that can be very disruptive to the classroom and therefore students learning. Though luckily it is something that’s somewhat easily avoidable, with the right preparation and proper caution, alongside creating a generally positive classroom atmosphere.


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