Conciencia Cultural por medio de Materiales Autenticos

Abstract

Aiming to be effective and accurate English speakers we need to teach students the culture of the target language and language itself concurrently. From this perspective, I decided to extend prior work on the field of cultural awareness, precisely cultural values of North American people. My dissertation addresses two main questions; how do ninth grade students approach awareness towards North American’s cultural values? And how do students address authentic materials to attain target cultural values awareness? Additionally, this study hypothesized that using authentic materials in the classroom will help students acknowledge important aspects from the target culture, reason why, the methodology used to answer the leading questions of this study, was the implementation of authentic material reading workshops, which aimed to provide students with authentic cultural background from the target language, allowing them to become more effective accurate English speakers. Consequently, my most important contribution to the field of cultural values awareness is the development of a pedagogical methodology that lays on the use of reading workshops combined with authentic materials chosen based on their cultural content. In addition, my study advances our understanding of North American’s cultural values which is a topic that has not been researched in depth.