Integrated-skills based syllabus for primary schools

2.3. Materials for Cultural Awareness .
One effect of the 'communicative turn' in ELT since the late 1970s has been the elimination of culturally specific content from published teaching materials, often to the point of utter exclusion. The transition to a functional approach to EFL instruction, motivated by needs analysis and measurable performance goals, has occurred at the same time that people are becoming more aware of the expanding significance of English as an international language.
It is hardly unexpected in this environment that cultural identity is viewed as, at best, a luxury and, at worst, as irrelevant. Cunningsworth made the following arguments in opposition to "the culture-specific coursebook,"[4] which are still evidently persuasive to major ELT publishers today: The culture-specific coursebook has the drawback that only students who are familiar with the context in which it is situated would find it useful. In fact, a vivid depiction of British life may likely prove to be more of a hindrance than an aid to the learner. Instead of understanding how the social world is structured, which is something the student is unlikely to ever encounter, it would be preferable to spend that time learning the language.
The fact that the idea of culture in language teaching has come to be associated with an antiquated method of disseminating unmediated facts and information about an implicitly superior "target" culture complicates the already problematic relationship between culture and language teaching and learning even further. As a result, the idea of an integrated language-and-culture pedagogy which emerged throughout the 1990s, has thus far had a negligible influence on the creation of ELT materials. Tomlinson and Masuhara (2013) evaluated current global course books and used the likelihood of facilitating the development of intercultural awareness as one of the criteria. Byram and Masuhara (2013) evaluated the opportunities for the development of intercultural awareness in two recently published global coursebooks.[20 ] However, there have been academic publications calling for a greater inclusion of the cultural dimension in the teaching of foreign languages.
A book encouraging students to reflect on their own language and culture and compare it to that of other countries was published Byram and Masuhara have persuasively argued for a greater emphasis on intercultural communication. This chapter starts with the strong premise that techniques that ignore the cultural aspect of language are fundamentally wrong and that sociocultural meaning difficulties are always present in language teaching and learning. It will challenge the presumption that placing English in a specific cultural context must inevitably be improper whether English is viewed as a lingua franca Jenkins et al., 2011or as a family of World Englishes. [11] The argument is based on a concept of intercultural foreign language education, in which the learner takes on the role of a comparative ethnographer as part of the process of learning a foreign language. The need for materials that prioritize the learner's identity as an integral factor in developing the capacity to function fully in cultural "third places" is suggested by the assumption that learning a foreign language involves a cognitive modification that has implications for the learner's identity as a social and cultural being.
Materials must go beyond a cursory acknowledgement of cultural identification ('Now write about your nation'), and they must go deeper in addressing the kind of cultural adjustment that underlying the experience of learning a foreign language. Literary writings that emulate or more explicitly depict experiences of cultural estrangement are a potent tool for increasing this type of awareness in readers. For ideas and examples of how to employ a text-driven strategy to aid language learners in developing international language awareness, see Tomlinson and Masuhara.[ 17:1] The pedagogical ramifications go beyond questions of content, though. If language is seen as the embodiment of cultural identity and culture as the expression of beliefs and values, then the methodology needed to teach a language must take into account the ways in which the language expresses cultural meanings.
Along with addressing language as a system and cultural knowledge, a combined approach to teaching language and culture will also place additional emphasis on language features that are culturally significant as well as the abilities needed by students to understand cultural diversity. Connotation, idiom, the creation of style and tone, rhetorical structure, critical language awareness, and translation are a few examples of language-related topics that would be included in an expanded language curriculum that considers cultural specificity. To increase multicultural awareness, ethnography and research abilities would be added to the standard range of language skills [3]
When it comes to the corporate sector, where language teaching is generally viewed as a training activity, objections to a cultural agenda for ELT typically emerge from an ethnocentric perspective. It is notable that the most cutting-edge resources for teaching language and culture were developed in state-run educational environments in nations with long-standing, unbroken traditions of doing so.
English Unlimited, show positive signs of increasing cultural relativism and pluralistic depictions of English-speaking societies. But these advancements will only be primarily cosmetic as long as courses are still created for a worldwide market and only seen as language instruction. This chapter will discuss a number of recent initiatives that indicate the development of materials tailored to individual institutions as well as various forms of country-specific collaborative publishing ventures is the way forward for integrated language-and-culture resources.