Week 8: Culture, Materials, and Methods Reflection

This week's readings were very insightful in regards to the materials used in a classroom and the effect it can have on the students- especially English Language Learners. Tyler-Mendes, Giashi, and Hinkel all demonstrate and explain to what extent the materials-specifically textbooks-can influence an ESL classroom. Before reading these articles, if someone were to tell me a textbook could negatively influence students, I would think it would be due to inadequate content or poorly written structures. Therefore, after these readings, you can understand how surprised I was to find out how much the images in a textbook play a role in the perspective of ESL student. Images of white, middle class people and images of poor black people in textbooks demonstrate how gender roles or race are perceived in a certain culture which can create stereotypes that the learners are somewhat taught to believe. Tyler-Mendes's article mentions how we should discuss the images in the EFL books to prevent this from happening. Having ethical discussions with our future classrooms can really help us as teachers to avoid the students from forming social prejudices and stereotypes.

Giashi explained the difficulties ESL students go through when given material to read in their English classes due to a feeling of "inferiority" to the teacher and the rest of their class. I can't imagine what that would feel like, and I am positive that if I were in these student's position I would feel the same way. Its so easy to feel vulnerable when exposed to something that we may feel we will fail at, something that will possibly embarrass us something that has potential to threaten your cultural stereotype.  This author also discusses how ESL textbooks should focus on its visual presentation rather than the textual content, and that critical image analysis is the way to go about dealing with these images. As teachers, it will be beneficial to critically analyze the images in a given textbook to help the students become more aware of the issues in society and how to deal with them. 

Chapter 11 by Hinkel's discussion about the importance of having a textbook that emphasizes culture stood out to me because I agree with this suggestion. It relates to his focus on how a teacher can learn along with his or her students through discussing and evaluating the cultural content of the textbooks such as social identity and social groups, social interaction, belief and behavior, national identity, etc. I believe these are very important things to discuss in an ESL classroom so that the students understand the diversity that is among them and to help the teacher understand their students perspectives as well. Discussing and evaluating cultural content of textbooks will (hopefully) create a more comfortable atmosphere in the classroom by allowing the students to freely express their opinions and thoughts and, more importantly, free themselves of any stereotypes they may hold of a culture according to the texts.