Raising cultural and diversity awareness in the primary english classroom

• Autor(a) principal: Colaço, Mónica Martins
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/21596
• topic: (inter)cultural awareness; Diversity; Primary school context; English language teaching; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas

The present research project focuses on investigating how students’ cultural and diversity awareness can be raised while teaching a foreign language to young learners. Nowadays, key notions such as difference and diversity are being replaced by others of a more homogenizing, standardizing kind, typical of the globalised era in which we live. Simultaneously, and as a consequence of this tendency, the topic of intercultural awareness has been insufficiently developed, especially in the foreign language classroom in the primary school context in Portugal. As an example of this, primary course books resort more and more to symbols or icons in an unsuccessful attempt to show diversity, instead of presenting young learners with a deeper, more varied – in a word, more realistic – view of differences between people and cultures. It is my view, then, that the foreign language primary classroom is the ideal setting for this: that is, to learn about diversity while learning a new language, to acquaint children, who are naturally drawn to what is different, with various concepts of difference and otherness, and ultimately to raise better, more tolerant and inclusive human beings. To do so, I chose a small series of diversity related-topics which were dealt with in class, not in the traditional method, but with the aid of new materials produced by myself, specially aimed at simultaneously promoting the diversity awareness of young learners, and improving their language skills. The result was a more understanding, more open, and also more knowledgeable group of young learners – proof that, under the right circumstances, and with the correct motivation, the foreign language classroom is indeed an optimal place to change the current negative tendency of not thoroughly developing the teaching of diversity, difference and empathy in classrooms.