Losing Strangeness: Using Culture to Mediate ESL Teaching

Abstract

This paper explores ways of using culture and cultural practices as an informing principle in ESL teaching. To research culture and ESL teaching, we conducted focus groups with teachers in an urban ethnically diverse school in Toronto, Canada and their student teachers during their month-long practica in the school as a part of a Bachelor of Education programme. As instructors in the teacher education programme, we set out to find ways of infusing culture and cultural awareness into our coursework on ESL teaching and learning. The implications for the study show that culture should not be viewed as a ‘discrete’ or ‘bounded’ entity and that teacher education programmes need to do a better job of bridging the divide between theory and practice.

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