Intercultural competence in teaching esl students…

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ………………………………...………………………........		4
CHAPTER I	INFORMATION ABOUT …………….
1.1	THE NOTION OF INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE………..….	7
1.2	EXPLORING SURFACE AND DEEP LEVELS OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION ……………………………………	11
CHAPTER II	INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE IN TEACHING ESL STUDENTS…................................................................	14
2.1	ENHANCING STUDENTS’ INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE THROUGH DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES……….………………	14
2.2	INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE DEVELOPMENT THROUGH INTERNATIONAL NEWS ……………..………………….	25
CONCLUSION…………………………...…………………………………….		30
REZYUME……...………………………………………………..…………..…		32
THE LIST OF USED LITERATURE …………………………….………....		34

INTRODUCTION
As an American writer of modern tragedy Eugene O’Neill is democratic. He wrote plays in the style of Greek tragedy, but he has also given a distinct modernist touch to his plays even if they are after the style of Greek Tragedy. Although he put his plays in the dimension of attic (Greek) tragedy, he has detached himself from certain forceful dictation of the Greek tradition. Unlike the Greek playwright, he deliberately chose a New England farmer and his family as the protagonists of his drama. This trend to introduce a humble character as the protagonist of the play is itself a kind of experimental break with the canonical demand. Towards this direction off, inverting the canonical imperative, O'Neill is the first trend-setter. In a Greek tragedy fate animates its tragic world, whereas the emotional forces of jealousy, resentment, lust, and incestuous love animates Desire under the Elms. Desire under the Elms is set on a typical rocky New England soil. There is a contrast in the play's representation of two different kinds of life. The unyielding toughness on that land contrasts with the easy life to be made from gold mining in California. Ephraim Cabot, the seventy-five year old father, has been made hard and physically powerful by his work. He has just taken a third wife, the young and scheming Abbie. His youngest son, Eben, has decided to stay on the Farm While his two other sons plan to go to California and put New England behind them.
The sense of having been dispossessed of his farm by his new stepmother drives Eben to hate Abbie, who has married the elder Cabot merely to inherit his farm. At first, the sparring between Abbie and Eben is based upon calculating self-interest, but eventually their feelings overpower them. Lust turns to love, and the son they produce is passed off as old Cabot's, although the townspeople have no illusion about whose child it is. The farm itself is a powerful presence in the play. Whenever old Cabot thinks he should give up and follow the promise of easy money in California, he feels God's presence urging him to stay. God operates for Ephraim as the Oracle in Oedipus Rex, giving him a message that is painful but must be obeyed. The rock on the farm are unforgiving, and so is the fate that Abbie and Eben face. Theirs is an impossible love, everything they do to prove their love condemns them even more. The forces of fate center on the farm.
When the play opens, Eben says of it, "God/Purty" When the play ends, the sheriff praises the farm and says he surely would like to own it, striking a clear note of irony: The agony of the play is rooted in lust- lust for the farm that parallels the lust between Abbie and Eben. The play is haunted by the ghost of Eben's mother, whom Ephraim married primarily for her farm. Her ghost is exorcised only after the cycle of retribution has begun. Old Cabot has committed a crime against her, and now he must become the victim. The language of the dialogue is that of New England in the Mid-nineteenth century. Living in New England, O'Neill understood the ways and the language of its people. He seems to have imagined the "down-east" flavor of Maine in the language, and he has been careful to build the proper pronunciation into the dialogue. This folksy way of speaking helps emphasize the peasant like qualities in these New England farmers. O'Neill's careful use of language is reminiscent of Synge's masterful representation of the Irish-English speech in Playboy of the Western World. The language of 0'Neill's characters has a rocky roughness at times. Characters are economical, they often answer in a single word: "Ay-eh". Faithful to his vision of the simple speech of country folk, O'Neill avoids giving them elaborate Poetic soliloquies. Instead, he shows how, despite their limited language, rural people feel profound emotions and act on them. O'Neill Carefully links Abbie with Queen Phaedra, who is Euripides' play Hippolytus and in Racine seventeenth-century play Phaedra finds herself uncontrollably desiring her husband's son as a lover. Racine and Racine's audiences could easily imagine such intense emotions overwhelming a noblewoman because they thought that nobility felt more intensely and lived more intensely than ordinary people. But O'Neill is trying to make his audience see that even unlettered people can feel as deeply as tragic heroes of any age do. The Cabots are victims of passion. They share their fate with the great families of the Greek tragedies.

Eugene O’Neill (1888- 1953) was born in New York into an Irish-Catholic theatrical family. His early life was restless: his father, who was an actor, spent most of his career touring in the lead role of the popular melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo.

Eugene O’Neill (1888- 1953)
Eugene O’Neill (1888- 1953)


In 1895 O’Neill was enrolled in the St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, and transferred in 1900 to the DeLa Salle Institute in Manhattan. During these years his mother’s addiction to morphine left profound emotional scars on the growing O'Neill. In 1902 Ella O'Neill tried to commit suicide. After renouncing Catholicism, O'Neill entered in 1902 the Betts Academy in Stamford, a non-sectarian preparatory school. Six years later he entered Princeton University, but left it after a year. During this period he spent most of the time in New York waterfront bars and brothels. In 1909 he married Kathleen Jenkins. The marriage ended two years later. They had one son, who has to commit suicide at the age of forty. In the late 1910s O'Neill dramas begun to gain recognition in New York. Between the years 1918 and 1924 he wrote among others Anna Christie, The First Man, The Hairy Ape, The Fountain, and Welded. O'Neill included unpleasingly formidable subjects in his plays. Those unappealing subjects of his plays were shocking to the conventional theatre goers. O'Neill provided the soul's interior to those American audiences who came to his theatrical world. For example, the disappointment and painful surroundings of Anna Christie and the brutality of the lower-class and stoker in Hairy Ape were totally alien themes to the traditional theatre goers of O'Neill's time. Upon the whole O'Neill's characters are haunted by family agonies, affections never given, ambitions never realized, pains never assuaged. In 1918 he married the writer Agnes Boulton; they had two children. O'Neill's father died in 1921 from cancer, next year he lost his mother, and twelve months after that his brother James died from a stroke. The Pulitzer winning Beyond the Horizon (1920) was O'Neill's first important play. The story depicts two brothers, Andrew, the elder a practical realist, and the younger, Robert, a poetic idealist. Robert is incapable of managing the family farm. When Andrew returns from a long voyage, successful and wealthy, he finds Robert dying of tuberculosis. On his deathbed, Robert still dreams of freedom beyond the horizon. In 1935 O'Neill began work on a cycle of eleven plays, with the theme of the turmoil of American materialism. The cycle was never completed - only two plays have survived. On his final productive period O'Neill wrote Long Day's Journey into Night, an agonized portrait of his own family, the Tyrones in the play. Again the action takes place in one room. Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction: "None of us can help the things life has done to us" says Mary. Edmund, based on the author himself, is stricken with tuberculosis. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Hughie (1959) was a story about a small time gambler, and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1952) continued O'Neill's family history of the Tyrones. The Iceman Cometh is perhaps the finest of O'Neill's tragedies. The story is set in a dockside bar on the lower west side of New York City. It concerns a group of drunken derelicts who spend their time in the back room of the Henry Hope's saloon where they discuss their hopeless lives. Eugene O'Neill, an American dramatist, who is internationally reputed in the field of drama, also got the noble prize in 1936, on the strength of the bulk of his experimental plays. He was influenced by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Maurice Maeterlinck. He is remembered for realist, naturalist and expressionist drama. Moreover, the credit goes to Eugene O’Neill for his realist and naturalistic play. Before O’Neill in American theater, there were melodrama which were sentimental and having the sense of excitement. But when O'Neill came to the philosophical subject matter, he became out of reach from the audience, because he got the subject matter of ancient Greek time and mix it with Freudian psychoanalysis. For example Desire Under the Elms is completely realistic drama set in 19th century New England (America). Its theme is sexual desire and the desire of the land. O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh is very much philosophical and gloomy play that was staged on Broadway in 1946. It was not much liked by the audience. It became only popular in off Broadway in the year 1956. Another finest play of O'Neill is Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) is considered by many critics to be a triumph of realistic drama and O’Neill’s finest play. It is about human responsibility and love-hate within a family. More mature works of Eugene O'Neill are characterized by heavy experiments. His famous expressionist plays like Strange Interlude (1928) and, Dynamo (1929) belong to the category of expressionistic dramaturgy. O'Neill's mature voice in drama is the product of his wide experiences of travelling and his sustained apprenticeship to the then theatrical personnel. During his lifetime his plays did not become successful because the frightening dark vision in his plays offended those spectators who were accustomed to the comfortable and pleasing world of a light comedy and sentimental play. O'Neill's posthumous success is incredibly gigantic. O'Neill's dramas possess remarkable abilities and power. But the traditional audience of his failed to appreciate the experimental diversity and chilling thematic grandeur of his plays. Compelled by the tragic magnificence of his plays, the conventional American theatre goers accept his plays with a shocked alertness. O'Neill's early work is marked by a variety of experiments with theatrical effects and moods. Critics have traced the primary influences of Greek drama in Desire under the Elms (1927) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).
Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’Neill: Introduction
As an American writer of modern tragedy Eugene O’Neill is democratic. He wrote plays in the style of Greek tragedy, but he has also given a distinct modernist touch to his plays even if they are after the style of Greek Tragedy. Although he put his plays in the dimension of attic (Greek) tragedy, he has detached himself from certain forceful dictation of the Greek tradition.
Eugene O’Neill (1888- 1953)
Eugene O’Neill (1888- 1953)


Unlike the Greek playwright, he deliberately chose a New England farmer and his family as the protagonists of his drama. This trend to introduce a humble character as the protagonist of the play is itself a kind of experimental break with the canonical demand. Towards this direction off, inverting the canonical imperative, O'Neill is the first trend-setter. In a Greek tragedy fate animates its tragic world, whereas the emotional forces of jealousy, resentment, lust, and incestuous love animates Desire under the Elms. Desire under the Elms is set on a typical rocky New England soil. There is a contrast in the play's representation of two different kinds of life. The unyielding toughness on that land contrasts with the easy life to be made from gold mining in California. Ephraim Cabot, the seventy-five year old father, has been made hard and physically powerful by his work. He has just taken a third wife, the young and scheming Abbie. His youngest son, Eben, has decided to stay on the Farm While his two other sons plan to go to California and put New England behind them. The sense of having been dispossessed of his farm by his new stepmother drives Eben to hate Abbie, who has married the elder Cabot merely to inherit his farm. At first, the sparring between Abbie and Eben is based upon calculating self-interest, but eventually their feelings overpower them. Lust turns to love, and the son they produce is passed off as old Cabot's, although the townspeople have no illusion about whose child it is. The farm itself is a powerful presence in the play. Whenever old Cabot thinks he should give up and follow the promise of easy money in California, he feels God's presence urging him to stay. God operates for Ephraim as the Oracle in Oedipus Rex, giving him a message that is painful but must be obeyed. The rock on the farm are unforgiving, and so is the fate that Abbie and Eben face. Theirs is an impossible love, everything they do to prove their love condemns them even more. The forces of fate center on the farm. When the play opens, Eben says of it, "God/Purty" When the play ends, the sheriff praises the farm and says he surely would like to own it, striking a clear note of irony: The agony of the play is rooted in lust- lust for the farm that parallels the lust between Abbie and Eben. The play is haunted by the ghost of Eben's mother, whom Ephraim married primarily for her farm. Her ghost is exorcised only after the cycle of retribution has begun. Old Cabot has committed a crime against her, and now he must become the victim. The language of the dialogue is that of New England in the Mid-nineteenth century. Living in New England, O'Neill understood the ways and the language of its people. He seems to have imagined the "down-east" flavor of Maine in the language, and he has been careful to build the proper pronunciation into the dialogue. This folksy way of speaking helps emphasize the peasant like qualities in these New England farmers. O'Neill's careful use of language is reminiscent of Synge's masterful representation of the Irish-English speech in Playboy of the Western World. The language of 0'Neill's characters has a rocky roughness at times. Characters are economical, they often answer in a single word: "Ay-eh". Faithful to his vision of the simple speech of country folk, O'Neill avoids giving them elaborate Poetic soliloquies. Instead, he shows how, despite their limited language, rural people feel profound emotions and act on them. O'Neill Carefully links Abbie with Queen Phaedra, who is Euripides' play Hippolytus and in Racine seventeenth-century play Phaedra finds herself uncontrollably desiring her husband's son as a lover. Racine and Racine's audiences could easily imagine such intense emotions overwhelming a noblewoman because they thought that nobility felt more intensely and lived more intensely than ordinary people. But O'Neill is trying to make his audience see that even unlettered people can feel as deeply as tragic heroes of any age do. The Cabots are victims of passion. They share their fate with the great families of the Greek tragedies. communication perspectives are relative to one’s experience of intercultural communication events and encounters on a day-to-day basis. These perspectives are also fully entwined in our deeply-held beliefs and values that guide our thoughts and actions within and across cultural boundaries. It is, therefore a challenging task to write about intercultural communication in a way that would embrace the deeply-held views from multiple cultures. Building global communities has for different people a different meaning and for some it might seem an impossible task and a dream. For the authors of this book, the notion of building a global community is a desirable and an achievable goal in the twenty-first century. In fact, it is imperative that we pursue this goal, especially when cultures collide and continue to collide around us, at perhaps a more intense rate than before as a result of a variety of new communication and transport technologies that have brought more people together at greater speed around the world. Our histories continue to impact our present and our future and are significantly bound to our land of birth: Uzbekistan, South Africa, China and Trinidad and Tobago. However, we have been educated in Western institutions and traditions of thought at some point in our lives and the influence of Western education creates an intercultural conflict within us. Thus, there remains an intercultural tension between our indigenous knowledge, historical legacies, family, spiritual beliefs and value systems, our reality and our Western-educated xiv Intercultural Communication new identities. Within the context of the book and our writing, it is evident that often our voices are one and yet they are unique all at the same time. We are not a homogenous group even though we may have much in common, but what we aspire to is, building on what we share as the common good. We come from ancestries that have been colonized and which have suffered deep humiliation and atrocities based on race, class, nationality, caste, religion, gender, ethnicity and culture. We lived our lives with the belief that there is good in all people and that there is such a thing as social justice for all human beings. Unless we embrace and implement the social responsibility principles of honesty, integrity, goodwill, fairness, respect and dignity among all people in everything that we do, we cannot justify our claim to uphold social justice. We have to exemplify the belief that all human beings have a right to respect and dignity, to truth and to voice. Communities across cultures have fundamental beliefs and values that bind their histories and their destinies in a way that seems extraordinary. Philosophies and beliefs across cultural communities manifest their belief in goodness among all people in a variety of expressions that signify compassion, kindness, morality and honour. Examples of these are found everywhere. One example of how these expressions have a common thread is evident in the Golden Rule found in the resources and the literature of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding formed in 1992. The Golden Rule outlines the fundamental beliefs and values from 12 different religious and cultural perspectives, which all have a message for global understanding that suggests that both mankind and nature must be treated with the same respect that one feels is deserving of one. The 12 religious and cultural perspectives in the Golden Rule include Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Native American, Judaism, Jainism, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Christianity, Buddhism and Baha’i. These 12 perspectives are noted at the start of each chapter. Our intention is to enable every individual to embrace intercultural communication as an open agenda, where all participants in intercultural communication events and encounters have equal opportunity and responsibility to make it a positive experience. We hope that this xv Acknowledgements experience will become the foundation on which to build a harmonious global community that embodies mutual cooperation and understanding and one that remains firmly committed to respect and dignity for all. We hope that the book would be useful in advocating human rights for all, regardless of their diverse worldviews. Respecting and understanding diversity means that one recognizes, appreciates and accepts that individuals and groups approach life from their varying worldviews and that no specific worldview can be the dominant one. We believe that the book would inspire corporate and educational staff, development consultants, human rights officers, employment equity managers, programme and course designers, teachers and learners, healthcare professionals, legal practitioners, government policy makers and politicians to develop and build a sustainable global community. It is important that each individual and group approaches the promotion of intercultural communication events and encounters, only after they have undertaken a critical self-reflection of their own stereotypes and prejudices. Stereotypes and prejudices have become internalized among us over time and they interfere with our natural human inclination to accept other people for who they are. Thus, it is the deep introspective and critical examination of self that would be useful in encouraging a deeper understanding of intercultural concepts and respect for diverse communities. Only after one revisits one’s own fears and anxieties and challenges one’s internalized notions of stereotypes and prejudice within the consciousness, can one truly embrace the notion of global community building and support it through the development of intercultural communication skills, strategies, competencies and dialogues within one’s immediate community.
The present graduation paper deals with the study of teaching English vocabulary to the ESL students, which present a certain interest both for the theoretical investigation and for the practical language use.