Intercultural Activities Using Ethnography
Materials for Language Teachers and Learners
Embedded Files
The summaries below give you an overview of each intercultural language activity. As you can see, each activity asks students to engage in home ethnography, interact with authentic materials, and make cross-cultural comparisons. Most importantly, they all have opportunities for formal reflection built in, as well.
Click on each icon to access all the materials related to each activity, including the detailed lesson plans, student handouts, and other related materials. At the end of each lesson plan, you will find a written rationale that explains the concept of developing intercultural communicative competence through the use of ethnography and explains the specific decisions I made while designing these activities.
In this activity, students investigate the use of Spanish in their own community and compare that with the use of English in Spain and Puerto Rico. First, they will observe photos of English being used in public spaces in Spain and Puerto Rico and discuss why English may be used in these communities and for what purposes. Then, they will do their own ‘fieldwork’ to discover and document (in photos) the use of Spanish in their own community and present these findings to the class. They will discuss why Spanish is used in these instances and compare this with the use of English in Spain and Puerto Rico. Finally, they will identify places in their school/community that may need signs in Spanish that don’t have them & create signs to fill those needs.
In this activity, learners will be observing and comparing different types of cafés in their own community and in Spain. First, they discuss their preferences related to cafes. Then, they learn about different cafés in Spain through reading fieldnotes and viewing photos of the cafes on Google Earth. Then, they do fieldwork to observe cafes in their own community and compare this knowledge with what they found about cafes in Spain. Finally, they get the opportunity to role play ordering at a cafe and interacting in this context.
In this activity, learners will observe and describe a public art gallery or museum, focusing on the contents and the behavior of the visitors. They will then present their observations to the class and begin to compare these observations with two different museums in Spain. Also, by learning about museums in Spain, they will be asked to identify some important Spanish artists and works of art.
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