Cath Up Friday 8 Servitude

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Developing Intercultural Awareness through Reading Comprehension while Designing Materials
A key tool to develop the Intercultural Competence is through reading comprehension. The first step in this
process is to choose the readings for the class. There are two types of readings: extensive and intensive.
Derly Meliza Céspedes Roncancio
Lately, terms like world citizens, cultural and intercultural awareness have become more common in different
fields of society and education is not the exception. Within the classrooms, we can find cultural diversity since
the first day of class. In Colombia, thanks to its cultural diversity, teachers can face classrooms full of cultural
variations. In this context, teaching and learning English as a foreign language is mandatory. In this scenario,
two important factors are present cultural difference and a language that is not part of students’ own culture
(English). This event should be considered when preparing a lesson thinking about how to develop intercultural
awareness among students while learning an L2.
Before addressing the issue of how to develop intercultural awareness, it is worth defining this term.
Intercultural awareness is the basis of communication because it implies two different processes, the awareness
of the mother tongue culture and the foreign culture (Zhu, 2011). It means that when students start recognizing
general cultural terms in their mother culture like language or customs. Once this recognition is done, students
can compare and find similarities with the foreign culture. For example, when they can recognize in which
countries their mother and foreign language are spoken. As a result, while planning classes there should be a
time where students can analyze and recognize their own culture so to compare theirs with the foreign one. In
the same line of thought, intercultural awareness is an attitudinal process where a person identifies
commonalities among groups and notices some predominant features while developing an individual
perspective and insights on the matter (Adler, 1986). To sum up, intercultural awareness is a competence that
allows any person to understand, respect and break cultural prejudices by recognizing one’s own culture and
finding commonalities and differences between it and foreign culture.
A key tool to develop that competence is through reading comprehension. The first step in this process is to
choose the readings for the class. There are two types of readings: extensive and intensive. In this case,
extensive reading is the one that has more than a page and can be chosen by the teacher according to their
students’ needs. Thus, teachers should create their own libraries as well as design their own reading tasks
(Harmer, 2005). Hence, this article is focused on extensive reading. Once the teachers choose this type of
reading, they can start creating their own tasks. By doing so, teachers should consider that reading is an
interactive process between the reader and the text and it must be dynamic (Dutcher, 1990). Regarding this
assumption, the reading tasks should be designed to make reading comprehension easier and interesting
for to the students. They ought to be involved in a dynamic process of reading while bearing in mind their
previous knowledge and the connections students make while reading new information.
While designing the reading tasks, it is important to consider three important moments for helping students to
understand texts and even more when they are beginners in language learning. These are the pre, while and post
reading activities. These help learners to recognize what they previously know, relate new information to the
previous one and create new meanings. Based on this, the pre-reading activities allow students to recognize
their previous knowledge. By doing so, they activate their knowledge about the topic and evaluate what they
truly know. Once they do this process, the while reading activities are developed in this moment of the task,
new knowledge is presented that should be clear and logical for the students. Finally, the post reading activities
help learners to identify their new acquired knowledge, display their findings about the differences and
commonalities related to the cultural topics presented in the readings, and to reflect about their attitudes toward
these aspects.
As it was mentioned above, once teachers choose the type of reading, they must design their tasks when
creating their materials (tasks, worksheets, workshops, etc.). In this sense, there are some principles that
teachers should consider which help them make authentic materials, adapt them to students’ needs and
characteristics, do research and evaluate students (Tomlinson, 2012). As a result, creating own material help
teachers in many ways like building their own library helping students to be engaged in their learning process
and scaffolding students during the reading process while making sure they comprehend the readings. Similarly,
Núñez et al. (2013) and Núñez, Tellez, Castellanos and Ramos (2009) conceived materials as “teaching
resources and strategies used to maximize students’ language learning” (p. 172). This implies that creating own
materials eases students’ learning. Thus, it is the result of knowing students’ needs and learning styles. Finally,
Núñez et al. (2013) argued that materials are “socio-cultural resources that facilitate not only linguistic
interaction but also cultural exchanges between the various human groups” (p. 10). In this sense, creating own
materials helps to develop students’ intercultural awareness because it allows them to interact and share
information about their own cultural experiences. Also, it helps them to be more critical about their contexts and
more respectful about the differences.
As a conclusion, intercultural awareness is a competence that can be developed inside the classrooms through
the development of materials for improving reading comprehension skills. Once teachers recognize that
intercultural awareness is a competence that can be developed in the classroom, they can use readings in
English that explain various cultural issues. This allows students to develop awareness towards their attitudes
about their own and others’ cultural representations. For students to do so, it is important to develop materials
that help them understand this while learning and reinforcing their foreign language. To make this happen it is
necessary to design pre-reading activities that allow students to identify the information they already know,
while reading activities which help them to acquire new knowledge and post reading activities where students
identify commonalities and differences between their own culture and their peers.

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Developing Intercultural Awareness through Reading Comprehension while Designing Materials

Derly Meliza Céspedes Roncancio

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