Critical Incident

Transcript

English Teaching: Practice and Critique December, 2012, Volume 11, Number 4 http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/files/2012v11n4nar2.pdf pp. 190-205 Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes: Some classroom activities in South Korea KANG-YOUNG LEE Chungbuk National University ABSTRACT: This paper discusses what intercultural English learning/teaching (IELT) is in English as a world Englishes (WEes) and how IELT can contribute to the development of proficiency/competence among WEes and can be fitted into actual WEes classrooms. This is to claim that IELT be a pivotal contextual factor facilitating success in proficiency/competence among all varieties of Englishes in today’s globalised world and suggest that IELT be listed as a requirement for professional ELT qualifications in South Korea. To do this, the paper first talks about the present status of English as a world Englishes and its implication for the language/culture education. Then the study provides what IELT is and it consists of, and how IELT components can be realised in WEes classrooms. At the end, this paper presents some of the teaching activities conducted in the present author’s classes throughout two semesters of 2011. This may help WEes teachers especially from the inner circle varieties in South Korea to be equipped with the awareness and understanding of the main issues in IELT for his/her classrooms since students’ progress towards intercultural competence is under threat (Sercu, 2002) without teachers’ adequate development in intercultural communication and their active involvement and commitment with/to learners. KEYWORDS: Intercultural English learning/teaching (IELT), English as a World Englishes (WEes), intercultural competence, IELT components INTRODUCTION Foreign/second language pedagogy has been engaged gradually with theories of intercultural communication. This integration of an intercultural dimension has changed the way we understand today’s language education. Two main changes from the incorporation have become evident: (1) foreign/second language instruction is interwoven closely with a number of disciplines and their methodologies; and (2) objectives in language education are expanded to include the development of plurilingual and pluricultural competences. To make learners of foreign/second language more competent both linguistically and [socio]culturally, language education finds itself at present at a crossroad with multiple models of disciplines. This understanding, however, seems not to have been so far successful in the contemporary English teaching arena in South Korea (hereinafter, Korea) in clearly establishing the extent to which the customary boundaries of the discipline have been stretched. Since it seems evident that the status of English as a WEes has increasingly been accepted and that linguistic and [socio]cultural variations among all varieties of Englishes are visible in any classrooms of Englishes in the postmodern era, the proposed intercultural objectives and dimensions need to be incorporated into teaching practices by English teachers/practitioners in classrooms of Korea. This is Copyright © 2012, ISSN 1175 8708 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes chiefly because “‘teachers’ are pivotal in helping them [learners] take an intercultural stance, as students explore the nature of language and communication across cultures” (Ware & Kramsch, 2005, p. 190). THE WEES FRAMEWORK AND LANGUAGE/CULTURE TEACHING ITS IMPLICATION FOR THE Through the processes of colonisation, immigration, and globalisation, the English language has developed into “the most widely taught, read, and spoken language that the world has ever known” (Kachru & Nelson, 2001, p. 9). In fact, the language is now being very much used in geographically and historically remote settings from native speakers of the inner circle for purposes ranging from doing business and conducting professional discourses to carrying out everyday conversation, where no participation from native speakers is required. English has truly become used for internal, external and international purposes. This relentless expansion of the language in diverse sociolinguistic and sociocultural contexts has also brought about the development of new recognised forms and norms of English in local contexts. Early attempts to systematically identify the variety of Englishes have been conducted by Kachru (1985, 1991, 1992, 1998). He presents the global spread of English under this term, World Englishes (WEs). WEs is depicted within the three concentric circles: they are the inner circle Englishes, the outer circle ones, and the expanding circle ones. WEs represents “the types of spread, the patterns of acquisition, and the functional domains in which English is used across cultures and languages” (Kachru, 1985, p. 12). The inner circle is made up of the countries where English is the primary language such as the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The outer circle comprises the institutionalised, non-native varieties of English in such countries as India, Nigeria, Singapore. The expanding circle consists of such countries as China, Russia, Israel, Hong Kong, Korea, Mexico, where performance varieties are used. Kachru also classifies the English-using speech fellowships in the three circles as norm-providing, norm-developing, and normdependent. The inner circle Englishes are classified as norm-providing, whereas the outer circle ones are argued to be norm-developing. The expanding circle Englishes are norm-dependent. Kachru further vouches for new, legitimate local varieties of English, especially in bior multi-lingual communities (,that is, the outer circle Englishes) and that each recognised variety in the circle has been gradually used for international communication not just with native speakers but with non-native speakers. Then he contends for the irrelevance of the inner circle Englishes, stating that “the native speaker is not always a valid yardstick for the global uses of English” (Kachru, 1992, p. 358), and throws doubts on the ownership of the language claimed by the innercircle speakers. In recent decades, Englishes used in the expanding circle have been reported to be the fastest growing ones. Graddol (1999) reports that the number of non-native speakers of English will grow from 253 million to around 462 million over the next 50 years. This will lead non-native speakers of English to triple the number of native speakers worldwide (Pakir, 1999). According to Gnutzmann (2000), 80% of verbal exchanges English Teaching: Practice and Critique 191 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes in which English is used as a foreign or second language involve no native-speakers and are between non-native users of English. Rajagopalan (2004, p. 116) estimates that “...the native speaker’s supremacy is already under threat from the currently attested native/non-native ratio of 1:2; imagine their lot when the ratio reaches 1:10 in the not-so-remote future, thanks to the millions of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” This statistical dominance of non-native speakers of English, especially from the expanding circle, calls into question the periphery status of the circle Englishes and gives them a central position in the shaping and developing of English. This has recently led many ELT scholars (Canagarajah, 2006; Crystal, 2003; Jenkins, 2003, 2006; Lee, 2010; Matsuda, 2003; McKay, 2002; Rajagopalan, 2004; Talebinezhad & Aliakbari, 2001; Widdowson, 1994) to the following assertins: (1) English is truly universal in that the language has become “a heterogeneous language with multiple norms and grammars” (Canagarajah, 2006, p. 232); (2) the language holds a status in both local and global contexts where the varieties of Englishes in the world relate to one another on a single level rather than on the three hierarchies as in Kachru’s three-circle model of English; (3) it is functional (that is, purely used as a tool for communication), (4) it is descriptive (that is, how it functions today throughout the world), not prescriptive (that is, how the language should be used); (5) it is multicultural (that is, speakers of more than one country and culture are almost always involved); (6) it is intercultural (that is, no particular culture and political system is specified, but cultures and discourse patterns of all varieties of English are equally interchanged/shared in intercourse). For such researchers, English language has become a World Englishes, and it “belong[s] to everyone who speaks it, but it is nobody’s mother tongue” (Rajagopalan, 2004, p. 111). No nation can have custody over the language, as Widdowson (1994) claims. World Englishes (WEes) here embraces all the above-mentioned arguments and undergirds the recent models of English labeled by different terminologies such as ‘English as Lingua Franca’ (Jenkins, 2000, 2006; Seidlhofer, 2001, 2004), “English as an International Auxiliary Language” (Smith, 1983), and “English as a Family of Languages” (Canagarajah, 2006). WEes is conceptualised as all the local varieties of Englishes used by people of different nations to communicate with one another. Unlike Kachru’s WEs, WEes not only claims the legitimacy of the expanding circle Englishes among all the varieties of English, but also seeks a dominant position of the circle Englishes in shaping/developing contemporary/near-future English. Regarding its pedagogy in WEes, Englishes of the inner-circle countries may no longer be the ultimate objective for the majority of learners. The competence/proficiency in WEes is rooted deeply in “multidialecticism”, which requires being proficient in at least one variety of English in order to be able to understand different varieties and to be able to accommodate one’s speech so as to be intelligible to the speakers of other varieties of Englishes. Thus, speakers/teachers of English should have necessary knowledge and skills to cope with variability in English and appropriate attitudes towards this variability. With respect to culture teaching/learning in WEes, it has been suggested by some (Alptekin, 2002; Byram, 1997; Guest, 2002; Kilickaya, 2004; Kramsch, 1998; McKay, 2003; Ware & Kramsch, 2005) that learners of an international language do not need to internalise the cultural norms of native speakers of that language since the English Teaching: Practice and Critique 192 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes ownership of an international language becomes denationalised. If that is the case, what aspect of culture in WEes framework should be considered important and listed in WEes education curricula? For WEes, target culture does not need to be American or British but should include a variety of cultures: in other words, “the world” itself (see Alptekin, 2002, pp. 62-63). Kachru (1992) emphasises that “English in the postmodern era represents a repertoire of cultures, not a monolithic culture” (p. 362). In fact, the diversification of cultures associated with the language is a fact, and learners/teachers of WEes have to be prepared to be competent in a divergent range of cultural backgrounds. What is most urgently needed here in preparing learners from widely different L1 backgrounds to interact with each other with his/her English is to raise awareness of IELT, so learners should be sensitive to the fact that people from different cultures tend to use English differently and that managing this difference is a responsibility that must be shared by anyone who take part in WEes community. The following section then devotes itself to what IELT is and what it consists of. INTERCULTURAL ENGLISH LEARNING/TEACHING (IELT) All language teaching approaches suggest particular ways of thinking about what language is for and imply how humans learn new languages. Drawing upon theories like structuralist linguistics and behaviourist psychology, the assumption that a language is a set of complex grammatical and phonological structures and that humans learn it with heavy practices of repetition, was unyieldingly advocated in the 1970s. This audiolingual method of language teaching, however, was largely displaced by the communicative approach in the 80s. The communicative approach views language primarily as a means of information exchange and embodies “communicative competence” as “what a [competent] speaker needs to know in order to be able to communicate appropriately within a particular speech community” (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972, p. 7). What is it then that learners in any language classrooms need to know to be competent in a particular language community? For the solution, adherents in the approach come up with not only knowledge and skills in the grammar of a language but the ability to use the language in socially and culturally appropriate ways in a speech community. However, this solution becomes problematic to many linguists (Buttjes & Byram, 1991; Kramsch, 1998; Liddicoat, 2002; Nostrand, 1991; Ware & Kramsch, 2005). This is chiefly because the communicative approach has been preoccupied with the notion of language as no more than a means of information exchange within a particularly monocultural speech community. In fact, all psycholinguistic models of communicative competence have firmly upheld an idea that the communicative norm is the native speaker interacting with another native speaker. For example, Canale and Swain (1981) and Bachman (1990) ignore the interculturality that is a necessary part of any communication involving a non-native speaker. Here, in the postmodern context where communicative and cultural needs of learners will be different among Englishes, a focus that should be placed on the notion of interculturality and on the intercultural language competence of learners is neglected. Intercultural English learning/teaching, as Corbett (2003) posits, draws upon the discipline of ethnography. Language in ethnography is viewed as one of the primary ways in which an individual manages his or her relationships with others. It differs English Teaching: Practice and Critique 193 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes from the communicative language teaching approach in which language is seen as primary means of exchanging information; here, the design of communicative activities is about the authentic transfer of information. However, IELT sees language use as involving much more than information exchange. Language through IELT is viewed as the main instrument by which we construct and maintain our sense of personal and social identity. It is the means by which we make and break our relationships. Language, in turn, is the tool with which we become aware of ourselves as one cultural being and of others equally as other cultural beings. This change in our understanding of what language does leads to a change in the curriculum of language education. Therefore, the IELT curriculum focuses less on tasks/exercises for information exchanges and more on those which enable the exploration of how we construct a sense of cultural identity, whether that construction occurs in small or larger conversational groups or in national communities. It is very important for students to observe and describe social and cultural groups. By observing and reflecting on the way that other cultures manage their social relationships through language, and comparing the practices of others with their own, students become ‘intercultural learners/speakers’ (Byram, 1997). IELT begins to ask learners/teachers to avoid seeing a monolithic or unified view of culture. Focusing on only one culture leads students (or some teachers) to see only a unified and monolithic culture (Cortazzi & Jin, 1999). When speakers of more than one country or culture interact, more than one set of social and cultural assumptions will be in full operation. Risager (1998) stresses that including only one culture in language teaching associated with specific people, a specific language, and normally a specific territory should be replaced by an intercultural approach depending on more complex and expanding target cultures. IELT encourages learners/teachers to be exposed not only to his/her own culture but to a variety of cultures. Alptekin (2002), as a Turkish ELT professional, reports that there have been many instructional materials where cultural content mainly comes from the familiar and indigenous features of the local setting (that is, Turkish culture). He stresses that although those materials can motivate students and enhance their language learning experience, they are not enough in a world where English is taught as an international language, the culture of which becomes “the world” itself, not only the home culture. Consequently, he calls for a new pedagogical model of the “successful bilinguals with intercultural insights” (p. 63) in the WEes community. Alptekin contends for both a local and global need of intercultural English learners/teachers, as suggested by Byram (1997). In a study analysing 11 Korean EFL high-school conversation textbooks, Kang-Young Lee (2009) investigated what aspects of culture learning/teaching were included and how they were taught. He found that all of the textbooks had neglected the teaching of both intercultural aspect of culture learning and the small “c” target-culture learning (that is, the invisible and deeper aspect of a target culture such as sociocultural values, norms, and beliefs). Instead, the majority of the textbooks showed a strong preference for the Big “C” target-culture learning (that is, the visible and memorisable aspect of a target culture), which was mainly from the US, indicating a “hierarchical representation where the US variety among all English-speaking cultures was presented as the supreme source [for Korean high school students]” (p. 92). The author then called for an immediate inclusion of intercultural aspect of culture learning/teaching to develop intercultural English language competence in designing EFL textbooks. English Teaching: Practice and Critique 194 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes Thus, IELT in its curriculum puts learners into a position to see cultural contents at the level of both his/her own local and global contexts. Alptekin (2002), regarding the Turkish ELT textbook, stated how irrelevant the cultural content focusing only on inner-circle cultural themes can be in teaching English. On the other hand, he exemplified how relevant the following cultural content was: dealing with British politeness or American informality in relation to the Japanese and Turks when doing business in English in IELT perspective. McKay (2003) also insisted on teaching culture in both local and global contexts, so learners recognise that the use of language (for example, pragmatic rules) reflected by sociocultural values and norms of an English speech community differ cross-culturally. She reported the advantages of using international culture by emphasising that texts in which bilingual users of English interact with other speakers of English in cross-cultural encounters for a variety of purposes, exemplifying the manner in which bilingual users of English are effectively using English to communicate for international purposes. These texts include examples of lexical, grammatical and phonological variations in the presentday use of English and have the potential to illustrate cross-cultural pragmatics in which bilingual users of English draw on their own rules of appropriateness. These texts, according to McKay, might then provide a basis for students to gain a fuller understanding of how English today serves a great variety of international purposes in a broad range of contexts. IELT is comparative. It is based on learning to notice differences, importantly through self-exploration of difference rather than the teaching of difference. As RobinsonStuart and Nocoon (1996) claim, no culture in the IELT community stands alone as superior or inferior. There are indeed only differences among cultures. However, learners/teachers in IELT are encouraged actively to seek “general empathy” toward other cultures and have a “positive intention” to suspend any judgments and see other cultures through overlapped lenses for better and effective communications (Hinkel, 2001). It is this “intercultural stance” (Ware & Kramsch, 2005) that “can help their students [learners in WEes community] develop a decentred perspective that goes beyond comprehending the surface meaning of the words to discovering the logic of their interlocutors’ utterances” (p. 203). Being fully aware of the logic underlying language will help learners understand better their own reasoning and the cultural context from which it comes, as well as the others’ viewpoints. Thus, learners of WEes become “intercultural speakers” who will be successful not only in communicating information but in developing a human relationship with people of other languages and cultures. What comes next to prepare learners/teachers of WEes to be competent in IELT is to raise the level of knowledge in IELT mainstreams, that is, knowledge, behaviour, attitude and critical awareness of/toward IELT, as Byram (1997) outlines. The next section concentrates on what IELT mainstreams are in detail and how main IELT components can be fitted into WEes classrooms. BRINGING THE IELT MAINSTREAMS INTO WEES CLASSROOMS Attempts were made from the 1990s to delineate intercultural mainstreams in the dimensions of language use, contextual knowledge and attitudes. Cormeraie (1998) argued that the development of intercultural language competence needs to concern English Teaching: Practice and Critique 195 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes itself with knowledge, feelings, attitudes and behaviours. This intercultural mainstreams learning (that is, knowledge, behaviour and attitude) is more adequately schematised with such French term as “savoirs” constituting Byram and Zarate’s (1997) model of intercultural competence. Categorically, there are the four mainstreams of saviors (that is, knowledge, behavioural, attitudinal and critical awareness): 1. Savoirs: it is “knowing” or knowledge of culture (both oneself and otherselves), including sociolinguistic competence; awareness of the small “c” aspect of culture such as values, beliefs, meanings (knowledge aspect); 2. Savoir comprendre: it is knowing how to understand via skills to interpret documents from other countries and explain and relate it to one’s own culture (behavioural aspect); 3. Savoir apprendre/faire: it is knowing how to learn/to do (or integrate) via skills for discovering new knowledge and for interacting (or integrating the knowledge into interaction) to gain new ability (behavioural aspect); 4. Savoir être: it is knowing how to be via having been equipped with attitudes involved in relativising the self and valuing the other (that is, ethnorelative attitude) by setting aside ethnocentric attitudes and perceptions (attitudinal aspect); 5. Savoir engager: it is knowing how to commit oneself to the development of critical and political awareness to think about things actively and intelligently rather than just accept them (critical awareness aspect). Byram (1997) later succinctly outlines the four mainstreams with some details in a concise figure titled, “What ICC [intercultural communicative competence] Requires Learners to Acquire”. The approach has been further developed by Clouet (2008), who stresses that intercultural competence is a combination of social and communicative skills as follows: (1) empathy; (2) ability to deal with conflict; (3) ability to work collaboratively; (4) flexibility; (5) foreign language awareness; (6) awareness that culture causes different discussion styles, speech speeds, interpretation and thought patterns; (7) techniques for handling interactional difficulties; (8) reflection on one’s own cultural background; and (9) tolerance of ambiguity. Another significant contribution to the field of intercultural competence is Geert Hofstede’s (2001) research on cultural difference, which sheds light not only on theoretical aspects (especially the knowledge feature) of intercultural language learning/teaching but also on practical applications of it. He identifies and validates the two contrasting forces exiting within the five independent dimensions of national culture: (1) power distance (large vs. small); (2) collectivism vs. individualism; (3) femininity vs. masculinity; (4) uncertainty avoidance (strong vs. weak); and (5) longvs. short-term time orientation. This research gives us insight into understanding cultural forces and dimensions, not only within a culture but also across cultures so that learners can be more effective when interacting with people in/from other countries, so reducing the level of frustration, anxiety and concern. In interaction, wrong decisions about an interlocutor of a different culture very often seem to be based on cultural errors of judgment, thus leading to misinterpretation and, eventually, culture-related problems. English Teaching: Practice and Critique 196 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes The intercultural models discussed above feature dynamic elements at play in intercultural mainstreams. In particular, those four intercultural mainstreams (that is, knowledge, behavioural skills, attitudes and critical awareness) along with the cultural dimensions within the two different forces are all necessary to facilitate competence in IELT. Thus, when preparing classes, WEes teachers should pay greater attention, not only to knowledge (savoirs), but also to behavioural skills (savoircomprendre/faire), attitudes (savoir-être), and critical awareness (savoir-engager). Along with the intercultural mainstreams, another important challenge that should be identified is to understand the nature of the IELT process. The starting point to do this lies in a closer look at the definition of culture learning/teaching. Paige, Jorstad, Siaya, Klein and Colby (1999) provide the following: Culture learning is the process of acquiring the culture-specific and culture-general knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for effective communication and interaction with individuals from other cultures. It is a dynamic, developmental, and on-going process which engages the learner cognitively, behaviourally, and affectively. (p. 50) These researchers infuse a number of critical elements into their culture learning process. They are: 1. learning about the self as a cultural being; 2. learning about culture and its impact on human language, behaviour, and identity; culture-general learning, focusing on universal intercultural phenomena including cultural adjustment; 3. culture-specific learning, with a focus on a particular language and culture; 4. learning how to learn about language and culture. Paige and colleagues see culture as a dynamic and constantly changing entity interlinked with communication and interaction between individuals belonging to different intercultural contexts. The learning/teaching goal from this perspective shifts from a rote memorisation of cultural facts (that is, visible historical facts, arts and literature) to the acquisition of the culture-general (that is, intercultural) competence and learning how to learn about culture. The process of IELT, therefore, is not static. It actively involves transformation of students’ abilities to communicate and to understand communication, and of their skills for ongoing learning through observation and participation inside and outside the language class. This will help students to acquire a deeper understanding of the concepts of culture, cultural adaptation and intercultural communication, to develop strategies for dealing with cultural differences in communication, and finally to become more autonomous in the process of learning and to position themselves at an intermediate intercultural zone among cultures. Obviously, all aspects have to be taken into account in any language (including IELT) classroom environment where learning aims to rely, not only on the acquisition of knowledge about culture(s), but also on involving reflection and comparison between two sets of practices or more. Although the amount of culture and actual socialisation English Teaching: Practice and Critique 197 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes with other cultural beings that can be dealt with within the context of formal language classrooms is rather limited, there has been some important research on developing methodologies (Byram, 1988, 1989; Crawford-Lange & Lange, 1984; Crozet, 1996, 1998; Kramsch, 1993; Liddicoat & Crozet, 2001) for teaching intercultural language competence in language classrooms in a way that develops comparison, reflection and integration of authentic intercultural experiences into the cultural identity of learners. Among those methodologies, Liddicoat and Crozet’s (2001) model for intercultural language learning/teaching consists of four steps: (1) awareness raising (the stage where learners are introduced to new linguistic and cultural input); (2) experimentation (the stage to help fix learners’ newly acquired knowledge via experienced learning); (3) production (the stage of applying in real-life situations and feedback); and (4) feedback (the stage of reflecting on the experience of acting like a native speaker in the production phase and allowing students to discover their place between their first language and culture and their second). Notably, each step comes with roles which can be played by learners and teachers optimally in any classroom, along with materials and activities. All of the models have common features which can be seen as the basis for a methodology known as ‘intercultural language[English] learning/teaching.’ These common features are: • • • • cultural exploration; cultural comparison; cultural acquisition; negotiation (integration) of one’s own third place between cultures. Materials and contents should be employed in order to make learners aware of the IELT mainstreams, encouraging them to compare and contrast foreign cultures with their own. Materials that do this will, as Valdes (1990) suggests, prove to be successful with learners. The present study has found that coursebooks such as New English File (Oxenden & Latham-Koenig, 2000) and New Interchange (Richards, 2000) provide good examples of materials/contents that provide plenty of opportunities for learners to examine other cultures and their own from a “third place” perspective. Tomalin and Stempleski (1993) propose a range of tasks such as: class discussions, research and role-plays using materials drawn from English-speaking countries that promote discussions; comparisons and reflections on English culture from various countries and the learners’ own culture. These can be arranged around subjects such as cultural symbols and products (popular images, architecture, landscapes), cultural behaviour (values and attitudes, and appropriate behaviours), patterns of communication (verbal and non-verbal communication), and exploring cultural experiences (looking at learners own feelings and experiences of the target culture). Moreover, English language materials from the learners’ own culture such as local newspapers can prove an excellent source of cross-cultural materials. In order to get a comprehensive picture of the target culture from many angles, teachers need to present his/her students with different kinds of information. Besides, by using a combination of visual, audio and tactile materials, teachers are also likely to succeed in addressing the different learning styles of students. As such, the following list English Teaching: Practice and Critique 198 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes displays some possible sources of information which can be used as materials for teaching culture for IELT: DVDs, CDs, TV, readings, the Internet, stories, students’ own information, songs, newspapers, fieldwork, interviews, guest speakers, anecdotes, souvenirs, photographs, surveys, illustrations and literature. Standard activities (Corbett, 2003) to engage students actively in the target culture and language can be role plays, reading activities, listening activities, writing activities, discussion activities, and even singing. All such activities and materials should be deliberately chosen to portray different aspects of culture, highlighting attractive aspects vs. shocking ones, similarities vs. differences, facts vs. behaviour, historical vs. modern, old people vs. young people, and city life vs. rural life, and so on. Suggestions for teaching activities Bearing all the above-mentioned in mind, I offer some teaching activities. All activities below have been conducted with my classes throughout the two semesters of 2011. In the spring semester of 2011, the course titled, Action English, was taught, and the other course, College English Reading & Discussion, was for the second semester of the year. They were all offered as general English courses (required) for both freshmen and sophomores along with other juniors or seniors who had not completed the courses. Although several of the activities proposed in this paper have been drawn from traditional ESOL studies, they have had a special role in my courses, that is, they have been effective in training students’ cultural exploration, comparison, and cultural acquisition and negotiation (integration) of one’s own third place between cultures in such a large-sized class (more than 40). Quizzes Quizzes, reportedly effective in ESOL, may be useful in IELT for learning new information, testing materials that have been taught previously, sharing in pairs the students’ existing knowledge and common sense, predicting information, and introducing differences and similarities across cultures. Here, getting the correct answer is less important than thinking about the two cultures. Similarly, when watching a video or working with some other materials, students can be asked to identify particular features and note all the differences from their own culture. In my classes, I have used quizzes many times to motivate students’ intercultural insight. It has proved to be effective, that is, through interviews, I have noted that students have been in the position of exploring cultural differences/similarities from the intercultural stance (the third place) and of gradually developing intercultural competence for IELT. Movies via video Movies, among the possible sources for teaching IELT, are ideal for promoting the IELT mainstream awareness. They communicate a social reality via authentic materials or realia of a target speech community to language teachers to help students not only discuss the unique relationship of a language to the society studied but also establish the auditory, visual, and mental links students need for possible interaction with people from the speech community observed. Bringing native materials in the form of movies into my classes indeed developed students’ knowledge and skills for analysing and comparing key cultural elements in both their and foreign cultures. English Teaching: Practice and Critique 199 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes Specifically, the students seemed to have develop not only a perspective on how language and culture affect or interact with each other but also a sensitivity to cultural differences and intercultural negotiation. Early in the Fall semester of 2011, I showed my students a video movie titled, Angela’s Ashes, directed by Alan Parker (1999). The movie is about one family’s history of moving from America (the city of New York) to Ireland to get a better life and covers the fight for survival in the slums of Limerick in the 1930s and 1940s together with the socio-political situation of Ireland in those days. It also deals with social etiquette, business relationships, communicating and negotiating. Students were able to gain knowledge about Irish culture and history from the Irish conflict and from the distinctive accent and intonation of the Irish people. The classroom activities aimed at training students’ cultural exploration, comparison, and cultural acquisition and negotiation (integration) of their own third place between the cultures. The activities are divided into the three parts: previewing, viewing and post-viewing. Guest speakers and discussions/panel discussions Inviting a/some guest speaker[s] from other countries and classroom discussions can help students of WEes contrast their own cultural orientation with the cultural orientation of the invited speaker[s]. In the class, they compare and contrast, but are not encouraged to judge. Given the fact there are many Chinese and some Indian students enrolled at my university, I have organised frequent guest-speaker-talk-and-classroom discussions for my English classes throughout the two semesters of 2011 with students from China and India. They are asked to talk about their own experiences in China/India and then also discuss the cultural adaptation process when they first came to Korea. In the Fall semester of 2011, I invited two Chinese students (a 22-year-old male and a 21-year-old female,) studying both Korean and their own majors. They were asked to talk about their own experiences of how they adapted themselves to the Korean cultural environment. The male spent most of time talking about the following experiences: the Korean college structure and life; food and housing arrangements; the organisation of the town where he is staying; how friends treat each other; how hot the taste of Kimchi is (the most representative traditional Korean food); Korean students’ verbal patterns in classrooms (that is, they hardly talk and discuss and raise a hand to question, so Korean students are not active in conversation, especially female students); and Korean students’ nonverbal patterns (that is, they don’t make any gestures when presenting their own ideas). He clearly stressed exotic aspects of Korean culture, and it was clear that, in his view, Korean behaviour was rather strange. On the other hand, the female Chinese student seemed to have been somewhat upset by the presentation by the male Chinese student, mainly because her opinion of Korean culture was different from the male student’s. In the discussion that followed, many students noted that the male Chinese has looked at Koreans from his own self-referenced criteria. He had done exactly what many do when they look at a different culture. The students also seemed to have understood that cultural narrow-mindedness is not unique to any culture but presents in all cultures. Furthermore, the discussion changed the focus from “changing” one’s behaviour to “understanding” the behaviour of others and then determining what needs to be done so that both sides work together in the IELT arena. This experience English Teaching: Practice and Critique 200 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes helped my students in recognising stereotyping and the results of looking at others through one’s own cultural lens. It is easier to recognise such behaviours in someone from another culture than in oneself; thus, this activity for my classes was a real breakthrough. Role-plays and simulations Role-play or simulation, which has consistently been advocated by practitioners of communicative language teaching, can also become an effective classroom activity for IELT. By designing a task appropriate for IELT so that it provides opportunities for exploring unfamiliar perspectives, teachers can encourage learners to “de-centre” from their self-referenced criteria and see the world temporarily through their negotiated third place/eye, thereby, increasing intercultural insight. For many semesters, I have conducted a role-play called critical incident, as suggested by Corbett (2003). Critical incidents take examples of communication breakdowns as a result of cultural misunderstanding and use them as the basis of a role-play. In one example, a middle-aged British couple in Seoul, Korea are formally invited to dinner at their Korean lady friend’s house. The Korean lady cooks some Korean food and orders a considerable amount of food, which is indeed more than she actually needs and nicely decorates the food on the kitchen table. Her British friends manage to eat most of the food on the table. After the British couple leaves, the Korean lady mentions to her son that the British people were nice and quite well dressed,…but rather greedy. Meanwhile, back home, the British couple tell their children that the Korean lady is so kind and sweet,…but unreasonably lavish. Students are set the following task: (1) Imagine you are the Korean lady’s son; how would you explain the British couple’s behaviour to her? and (2) Imagine you are the British couple’s children; how would you explain the Korean lady’s behaviour to them? Here, learners are put into the position of occupying the “intercultural stance”, as coined by Ware and Kramsch (2005), that is, trying to see one person’s cultural behaviour from the perspective of another and attempting to interpret it. For instance, one could explain that the Korean lady was demonstrating her hospitality by providing as much food as possible, even if that is more than necessity. In fact, it is customary in Korea that when inviting guests and friends, hosts have to show their sincere welcome with the expansive preparation of food. However, the British couple – as is true of the older generation like them who were brought up in the aftermath of Second World War – were so accustomed to being in frugal and disliking being thought of as wasteful, that they felt compelled to eat as much they could of what was presented to them. This dinner is an effective representation of communication breakdown from cultural misunderstandings, in which the Korean host’s culturally determined behaviour can be misinterpreted by guests, and vice versa. The critical incident activity indeed helps inform the relationship between people who might hold quite different opinions about the world and how they might behave in various circumstances. Virtual learning environments via the Internet Adopting an ethnographic lens and exploring different cultures and reflecting on one’s own takes rather a long time (Roberts, Byram, Barro, Jordan & Street, 2001, as cited in Corbett, 2003). However, most learners of WEes do not have the opportunity to experience other cultures first-hand for a long period; instead, these times of English Teaching: Practice and Critique 201 K-Y Lee Teaching intercultural English learning/teaching in world Englishes globalisation via the Internet have enabled many learners individually or in class groups to make direct contact with people from other cultures. This new advent of a virtual learning environment (that is, a variety of the Internet-based communication applications and e-mail) indeed offers exciting possibilites for exploring each other’s language and culture through ethnographic tasks across the world. CONCLUSION In association with the WEes framework, this article has shown what IELT is and is composed of. Such IELT mainstreams as knowledge, behaviours, attitudes and critical awareness have been highlighted as something for learners/teachers of WEes to be equipped with. This article has addressed how the mainstreams can be achieved in WEes classrooms via strategies entailing cultural exploration, comparison, acquisition, and negotiation (integration) of one’s own third place among cultures. In the previous section, the article proposed examples of hands-on classroom activities. They were, quizzes, movies, guest speakers and discussion, role-plays and simulation, and a virtual learning environment. This article claims that IELT serves as a major contextual factor facilitating success in achieving competence/proficiency among WEes. IELT has become indispensable since intercourses among many recognised varieties of Englishes are unavoidable in the postmodern globalisation and the contemporary ELT environment. It should be clear by now that IELT has a lot to offer – it is an exciting, demanding, often difficult but ultimately rewarding approach to WEes teaching/learning. 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