ICC - Week 12 -Reflection

First a disclaimer. I have been butchering my set curriculum so as to insert and record these multiple STG assignments. For the most part my two employers have been graceful about the whole thing. I perceive a lack of patience for the intrusions however, and with end term tests next week, I couldn’t quite get away with another lesson devoted to ICC.

I did have to give an impromptu lesson on proverbs using material from the EBS website while an agent of theirs came to grade the class, and the merits of forming a partnership with my  employer company (SLI). So the best I could do this week was tweak the ‘Proverbs’ lesson to include proverbs from Korea and other places around the world.

We started by defining what a proverb is. Where they came from and to what purpose. I would perform some comprehension checks along the way to make sure the students were still with me. I modeled a lot of the sentences on the white board, and where possible I tried to get students to interact with each other in groups.

Students would try to come up with Korean proverbs, compare Korean proverbs with their western counterparts, and also to try to analyze other proverbs from around the world.

For example the proverb

“You never know your friends from your enemies until the ice breaks” – Eskimo proverb. 

We looked at why this could be identified as an Eskimo proverb and what different cultures focused on, as being important to them.

Another example would be the proverb

“Drawn wells have the sweetest water” – an Iranian proverb.

We spoke about what values this would indicate for those people. Their focus on hard work making a reward seem all the better, as well as the obvious focus on resources like water in a country where it is considered precious.

All in all, the cultural seen in the lesson was a mix of big C (Eskimo’s talk about ice a lot) and some small c elements (for Iranians hard work = sweeter reward).

We went on to do some worksheets where the students had to match some pictures to the appropriate pictures, and then discuss why they thought so in groups.

Finally, the students were given more worksheets where they had to write out other examples of the proverbs that they learned for the day.

For the proverb ‘one rotten apple spoils the barrel’ one group did give the answer of zombies. How one zombie would bite a human and then that human would turn and bite another person and spread the virus. I was a little worried that some of these proverbs may be too difficult for their proficiency level, but ultimately they displayed understanding with their answers. The girls in the class however, were extremely camera shy, and getting loud audible answers was tough.

In conclusion, given the limitations that I had to work with for the week (had to use specific EBS web material), I think I did a fair job of incorporating ICC elements into the lesson.  The students weren’t particularly thrilled to be learning about proverbs, but they participate when prompted. By constantly exposing my students to the big C and small c values and norms that these proverbs stem from, I can get them to develop cultural knowing and better understand what it is to be a citizen of the world.