Cultures Around the World

Abstract

Most Koreans spend a large amount of time and money on learning English. Despite the expenses, Korean learners’ language skills are only ranked 24th among 60 countries where English is not a native language (Oh, 2014). Many people argue that this is caused by the teaching method in Korea which mainly focuses on the grammar and the receptive skills due to the Korean college entrance exam. Therefore, many English educators have been advocating the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) for many years in order to improve students’ communicative competence (Ham, 2009). However, there also are many critics that CLT does not ensure linguistic accuracy and academic language proficiency as its focus is more on fluency and communication skills development. These issues emphasize the significance of balancing the language accuracy and communication skills in order to become a fluent language user. Being a fluent language user as a second language learner would require more than just acquiring the linguistic knowledge. Brewster, Ellis, and Girard (1992) emphasize the importance of raising young learner’s awareness of target language culture. Celce-Murcia (2000) also discusses that people need to be considerate of social-cultural contexts in order to communicate with others more effectively. Learning various cultures would raise the learners’ awareness of cultural differences that will enhance communicative competence. Therefore, it will be more effective when we, English educators teach the young learners about other cultures in English in order to develop their language proficiency and their intercultural awareness. This book will provide information about not only the target culture but also many different cultures around the world and content with communicative activities. The students will be motivated to learn language by learning about world cultures, histories, science, maths, and fun facts in English. This will help the learners to develop their language proficiency and their interpersonal communication skills. This book can be used in an after school program or small group classes that have interest in communicative language learning. It is designed for Korean young learners aged twelve to thirteen. As they been learning English in EFL contexts, there was a lack of opportunity for the students to produce the language. Therefore, their productive skills tend to be lower than the receptive skills. Their reading and listening skills are at level 4 according to WIDA. They can read and understand paragraph length of texts and understand content carrying languages with visual support. Their speaking and writing skills are at level 3 where they can speak and write their own opinion and thoughts about the content they learned with some grammatical errors and hesitations. This book will be based on the theme-based approach and provide the content carrying materials and communicative activities and tasks. Through learning and understanding fun topics on the various cultures, they will be able to develop their English proficiency in a meaningful way.