| Culture and language go hand in hand. It is impossible to have an appreciation of a language without an appreciation of the culture from which it evolved. It has been said that if you do not learn the culture, then you have not really learned the language. With all the data available, however, few second language curricula have been developed that stress cultural topics over the other competency areas in the ESL classroom. These cultural topics have traditionally been embedded into other competency areas such as grammar, conversation, reading, writing, etc.; It was my intention to design a curriculum which would primarily stress various American cultural themes over the other competency areas. These cultural themes would include relationships, leisure-time or hobbies, and holidays. Cultural topics could be altered, added, or deleted as needed.; My study describes how this curriculum was used in two classroom settings with two different proficiency levels, intermediate and advanced, in two private language schools in a suburb north of Mexico City, Mexico. To help prevent gender bias, the class in one school was taught by the male investigator and the class in the other school by a female instructor.; A pre-questionnaire was administered before and later a post-questionnaire was administered after the classes had been taught to analyze if the American culture curriculum had made a positive, a negative, or no impression at all on the all ESL students' attitudes, female ESL students' attitudes, and/or male ESL students' attitudes. |
