One of the good things about migration is the opportunities it brings for learning about other cultures. In this speaking and discussion activity students will be able to share their views and knowledge of other cultures. The activity is based on themes from the British Council OPENCities project.

Preparation
Download the interview questions and make enough copies so that every student can have one.


Procedure

  • If you have some music(s) from a different culture, it might be nice to bring it in and play it to your students, and see if they know where the music is from. This can be your lead in to discussing other cultures. You can also use images from Flickriver. Just click on this link: http://flickriver.com/search/culture/. You can download these images and print them for classroom use, or if you have a computer and projector in your classroom, open the link and start showing the students some of the images. Get their reactions and ask them if they know which countries the images come from and how they relate to culture.
  • Ask the students if they have ever experienced another culture, either through travel and holidays or knowing someone from another culture.
  • Tell the students that they are going to explore their views of other cultures. Hand out the interview sheets and put the students into pairs. Tell them to ask and answer the questions with their partner.
  • You may want to put students into new pairs once they have had the opportunity to discuss for a little while.
  • Be sure to monitor carefully and help with vocabulary. You may also want to check to be sure there are no strong disagreements among the students.
  • You might want to end the activity with a full class discussion.
  • Try to focus on any new vocabulary that has come up during the lesson.


If your students are really interested in discovering more about other cultures you could explore the eLanguages website at: http://www.elanguages.org/ and look for projects you and your students can get involved in.
 

Language Level

Comments

Submitted by GS on Sun, 10/16/2022 - 09:05

Good afternoon Mr. Nik,

My name is Gulzoda Sulton and I am from a country that not so many people know - Uzbekistan. I really appreciate that you have posted about this topic. As a person form a third-world country, I can say that, this could be really helpful for those, who live in countries like the United States of America, Germany, Spain, the UK and so on, because I have seen many videos on the internet where new generation do not know about existence of a big amount of countries. However, there is a small issue.

As I have written above, students have never ever heard about many counties, so what are they going to discuss. I myself do not know about the existing of so many countries either and on YouTube I have watched several videos, where people are trying to find out a name of a county based on a music. Those people were not able to do the "challenge", so how student are going to discuss about a culture if they do not even know the names of the areas? It means that in most cases this activity is directed to those countries that majority knows, like South Korea, Russia and etc and probably, at least, they have heard about these places through movies or music.

Despite this issue that I have written, I really liked your activity! Thank you for creating it.

Sincerely,
Future English teacher, Sulton Gulzoda.

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