Ivy Marrie Locsin

Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning Dr. Amarles

Journal #1

Title: Incorporating Intercultural Competences in Developing English Materials for

Writing Classes

Summary:

This research study was aimed at developing English materials based on intercultural
language learning for writing classes. The researchers used both quantitative and
qualitative data. The respondents were English language educational students at some
private universities in Indonesia. The researchers found out that students needed
materials that would facilitate them to write. It is necessary for the students to use
appropriate topics to help them produce texts that are linguistically accurate and
culturally appropriate. According to the respondents, they prefer topics about wedding
ceremonies, religious ceremonies, and family expressions. They need cultural texts
from target language. Most of the respondents need to enhance their vocabulary and
familiarity with text types. Also, students find it difficult to understand the English
structure and to develop ideas into paragraphs.

Based on the findings, the preferred teacher’s role in the classroom should be an
assessor of students’ drafts and writings. Teachers should also give feedbacks after
assessing students’ works. As for the students’ role, they prefer to have peered
checking, wherein they check their classmates’ work and give feedbacks to each other.

The researchers developed instructional materials that have four chapters with 7
activities. These activities represent these learning stages: 1. Warming Up, 2. Noticing,
3. Comparing, 4. Reflecting, 5. Concluding, 6. Constructing, and 7. Presenting. These
tasks are classified into two: reading activities and writing activities. In designing these
materials, researchers used texts from Indonesian culture, texts from the target
language, texts from the countries that use the target language as second language,
and texts from countries that use the target language as foreign language. The
proposed topics are: Unit I: Wedding Ceremony, Unit II: Historical Buildings, Unit III:
Music, and Unit IV: Myths. These materials were developed based on learning goals,
which is to improve students’ writing skills that should be linguistically accurate and
culturally appropriate.

As a result, students were able to construct descriptive, recount, narrative, explanatory

texts. The instructional model was beneficial for the respondents. The use of
interculture-based language learning for teaching writing skills is effective. The
developed tasks were appropriate. Students were very interested in learning their own
culture and it served as their prior knowledge to compare to the target language.

Insight:

When teaching a language, teachers should also teach the target language’s culture.
Students can learn the target language by comparing their own culture to the target
language’s culture. Intercultural language learning helps students to increase their
linguistic knowledge. Cultural aspects should be included when teachers choose
reading texts for their classes. In this way, students will develop their intercultural
competences. Intercultural competences help the students to understand the target
language. These competences are acquired through culture teaching because culture
teaching is to acquire communicative competences.

Learning the target language’s culture helps the students, not only to understand the
language and grammar, but also it helps them to communicate effectively with native
speakers if the target language. However, if we are going to look into the reality of our
classrooms, teachers don’t actually include culture as a part of the lesson. We
sometimes use the topics on culture as a springboard, but we don’t give much
importance to it as much as we give to grammar. Most teachers focus on grammar
rather than understanding the culture of the target language. Another problem is that,
some students are not even aware of their own culture. How are they supposed to
compare their culture to the target language’s culture wherein the first place, they are
unaware of it? On top of that, based on the research, Indonesians and Filipinos share
the same difficulties in understanding a language. Filipino students also find it hard to
understand the English structure and put their ideas into pragraphs.

Teachers should not just give random reading texts to the students. There are a lot of
things to consider when choosing a literary text, some of these are; the students’
interests, their areas to improve, their background knowledge, and of course, the target
language. We should ask or observe our students to know which topics are they
interested at. We should keep ourselves updated to the trends, so that we can catch up
with them. Diagnostic activities can help the teacher to know which area or skills the
students need to improve on. Also, we should not just check and record their work; it is
a must to give feedback to the students. In this way, students will know which areas
they need to focus or improve on. Checking their background knowledge would help
teachers to determine which topics he/she should give more time discussing. Teachers
should choose authentic texts from the target language. These texts should represent
the culture of the target language. If teachers will plan and develop their materials and
tasks thoroughly, they would not just improve the students’ writing skills, but also the
other three macro skills.