Teaching Cultural Literacy in the Classroom Lessons and Activities:

Lesson 1 Warm up activity: What for you does ‘culture’ mean? Why? Write for 3 minutes. List, semantic map, clustering (Teacher’s preference)
Come together into pairs or small groups of 3-4 and compare your writings. What do you agree about? What do you disagree about? Why do you think that you disagree about these ideas?

Activity 1: To enlarge students' understanding of ‘culture’

Divide class into pairs and have pairs to select a piece of paper from a bag. Papers will say ‘Turkish culture’, ‘youth culture’, ‘European culture’, ‘American culture’, ‘African culture’, ‘Italian culture’, ‘primitive culture’, ‘Arab culture’, ‘Thai culture’. Each pair makes a list of at least 5 things, ideas, words that they associate with their category. Pairs then split, and two large groups are formed; these people then present their ‘culture’ and its associations to their larger group. The other members must add at least 3 more ideas/words to the list. How, now, has your understanding of ‘culture’ changed, compared to when you first thought of it? What does ‘culture’ include that you didn’t think of before? Why?

Activity 2:

Groups or pairs will be given pictures representing stereotypical aspects of different cultures and asked to explain what the picture tells them about ‘culture’. Describe the pictures without showing the others, then show the others. Then explain what the picture mean to them in terms of culture. How are the images in these pictures similar and different from images that you are familiar with in your own culture? How does this help you to understand the picture? (Do you think that it limits the way you understand it?) Give reasons. Other groups may then join the discussions. 

Final Activity: Why do we have culture in an English composition course?

Why do we have culture as a theme in an English composition course? Why/How can you benefit by studying and writing about ‘culture’ as a management at an international university? Put ideas on board and discuss.
Teachers’ Note: This activity enables the teacher to clarify the goals of the course.

Lesson 2:

Students work in pairs to explain what they had in the first class along with the reasons. Then they report their ideas to the whole class. Teacher helps out and clarifies points about the first class.

Reading Activity: Formations of Modernity: 

‘The meaning of the term ‘culture’ has changed over time, especially in the period of the transition from traditional social formations to modernity. 
The first and earliest  meaning of ‘culture’ can be found in writing of the fifteenth century when the word was used to refer to the tending of crops (cultivation) or looking after animals. This meaning is retained in modern English in such words as ‘agriculture’ and ‘horticulture’. 
By the eighteenth century, ‘culture’ had acquired distinct class overtones. Only the wealthy classes of Europe could aspire to such a high level of refinement. The modern meaning of ‘culture’, which associates it with ‘the arts’ is also closely related to this definition .
Finally another meaning of the word culture has emerged, which has had a considerable impact on all the social sciences. It differs in emphasis from the other definitions, however, by concentrating more on the symbolic dimension, and on what culture does rather than on what culture is.

Text Tasks:

Scan for main ideas.
Read for number of definitions of culture.

Comprehension Activities: 

How many different definitions of culture does the writer mention: How does he categorise these definitions? 
Why do you think there are different definitions in different centuries? (i.e. Why do you think the first definition was based on crops and animals? 
How does the approach towards defining  culture change? 
Assign each group a definition to present with two examples to illustrate what the definition means and how it works. 

Discussion Activities 

Where do you place yourself in terms of defining culture? 
Where does your definition fit into these definitions? 
Do we use all these definitions today? 
Do you think that the ‘culture’ of a person affect the way he/ she defines ‘culture’?