German Culture, British Culture

I have taught groups of German students on vocational work placement programmes before. This group however were slightly different, they were the teachers not the students. This presented a different set of challenges, the biggest of which being them knowing exactly what they wanted and not being afraid to say it. This in itself was possibly a lesson in culture conflict but that is another story. In an attempt to react to the needs and wants of the 'students' (not all of which were reasonable) I did a session on British culture. In the course outline for the week it was intended to be a book exercise (language leader upper-intermediate chapter 11) but the only activity from the book I used in the end was the reading activity on culture shock.

We started by discussing what culture is and what makes it then moved on to talk about outside opinions of British Culture. We ended up with a list of stereotypes on the board and were then able to discuss which ones of them were true and which were not.

While this may seem to be somewhat frivolous it did have a serious point. It had become clear over the course of the week that these teachers wanted to take something back to their students in Germany, students who were potentially coming to England on a similar trip. The topic of politeness led on to a later lesson on how to talk to people in different situations while this board developed into a list of things which, as a teacher, they could tell their students before their first trip to the UK.

This is what they came up with.

Of course this is only one groups advice but there are some very valid points made, traffic and smiling being two of the key points. Having lived in Europe I know that smiling at people tends to make people look at you like a lunatic but in England a smile goes a very long way.

I am trying very hard here not to give the impression that I was making this up as I was going along, but lets face it we all know I was. As a teacher I am generally terrified of walking into a classroom without a step by step plan... so of course I did have one. Unfortunately with this group of students I knew that they were not going to like it. So instead of 'making it up' and prefer to call it thinking on my feet. A skill I think is very necessary as a teacher and the results of the lesson were good and I would do it again. If I was to repeat this I would add a lot more structure, probably some office language (depending on the students) and I would also keep the reading on culture shock as I think it was a good lead in to the advice exercise. Depending on the level of students you could also add in some grammar, modal verbs are a good one with culture, or vocabulary. In general this lesson was a reaction to a bad situation but I think that the students got something from it which they wanted and at the end of the day that was the point. I am still not an advocate of seat of the pants teaching but in this case there was definitely a good outcome which I could use again.