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Developing Cross Cultural Awareness in BusinessNotes for teachers |
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Understanding Stereotypes - Step 1
Objective : Make learners aware and reflect on the role, the importance and the origins of cultural stereotypes.
This introductory part is seen as a pre-requisite step before tackling the issue of cultural awareness in business.
Medium : video (duration : 25 minutes)
Tasks : 1) ANTICIPATE Before watching the film, learners should have already given some thought to the topic they are about to be confronted with, i.e cultural stereotypes linked to Chinese people.To do so, they are asked to make assumptions about what they will hear and see, choosing from several posssibilities. They will be able to check whether their guesses were right when viewing the film, thus providing a real purpose to the viewing activity. 2) LISTENING and WATCHING Learners watch the video to find out about Chinese stereotypes and confront their assumptions. 3) UNDERSTANDING Once again this step doesn't require the presence of a tutor as the learner will get the necessary feedback through direct interaction with the software. It is a matching exercise which aims to test and help the understanding of
some key information in the film. The learner's ability to write
logical sentences using link-words is also being tested.
4) DISCUSSION (15 mins) This activity is designed to be carried out in pairs, and ideally in a language laboratory (or through appropriate software) so as to enable the tutor to monitor the activity. He must be able to help and/or correct learner production, give new impetus to the discussion (if need be) and also assess learner performance and contribution to the debate.
If
there is no adequate equipment, learners can be asked to sit around a
table
and debate the issues (the number of students in each group depends on
the overall number of students in the class). The tutor will move from
one group to another with the same role as the one mentioned above.
Following the viewing of the film, learners will have reflected on the issues raised in the questions they have to discuss, and should contribute to the discussion with well thought-out arguments and examples to back up their point. Here, we are trying to make learners aware of the role stereotypes play in our perception of others and why it is important to go beyond those. Also we encourage learners to give their opinion on the way the film director has treated this issue. 5) WRITING Learners are asked to write a comment, stating their opinion of the video and post it on the website. This is a genuine communicative activity as the learner knows why and who he is writing to. No doubt learners will enjoy reading each other's comments once they have been posted.Here we encourage learners to pass judgement, express criticism and give an opinion. As this task is assessed, students must email their comment (or hand it in at the next class) to the tutor for feedback before posting it.
Raising cultural awareness - Step 2 Objective n°1:
Tasks :
Objective n°2:
In an interactive quiz, learners are faced with mini case-studies set in an international business context. For each of them they have to decide on the right attitude to adopt, according to what they know of the country's culture (or what they think they know).
NB : Entirely self-study activity. Immediate interactive feedback.
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Cultural Awareness in Use - Step 3 This step is centred around a role-play activity where the student is asked to assume the role of a cross-cultural communication expert. The role of the client is played by the tutor/teacher who will provide time-delayed feedback to students on their handling of the two major tasks.
As cross-cultural communication expert, each student is asked to provide his client with the relevant information and support required by the situation.The first assignment is to reply to an email, requesting assistance for a business trip to Sri Lanka. As for the second assignment, it involves returning a call (leaving a phone message) to inform the client about some basic Chinese cultural specificities. Technically speaking the message will be recorded in the language lab ( or with a tape recorder and a microphone). This will allow time-delayed assessment. This activity involves three major tasks
from the leaners : understanding what is being asked from them, looking
for and finding the relevant information and using it to suggest
solutions to satisfy the client's requests. Besides it is a
comprehensive activity as it involves the four skills.
haut de pageTesting others - Step 4
This
final activity is better suited for an assignment in pairs (or more) as
students need to be creative as well as imaginative to produce a demanding piece of writing which will require the use of numerous abilities.
Here students are requested to design a multiple-choice knowledge quiz to test the other students' awareness of a specific country's culture that each pair will have decided to focus on.
We recommend that the teacher provides guidance and advice, freely moving from one group to another to answer students' questions on language accuracy and general coherence of their work.
Before being exchanged amongst groups, the quizzes will be reviewed by
the tutor for both assessment and suggestion for improvement.
It is down to the students and/or teacher to decide whether quizzes
should be answered with or without consulting the Kwintessial cross-cultural solutions web pages.
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