SOCIAL ETIQUETTE ACROSS CULTURES: TEACHING ENGLISH FOR BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS AND RAPPOR

SOCIAL ETIQUETTE ACROSS CULTURES: TEACHING ENGLISH FOR BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS AND RAPPOR

Valíková, Daniela

To live a happy, fulfilling and purposeful life is something both teachers and students wish for. As relationships seem to be a factor which is most likely to make one’s personal life and career happy, successful and fulfilled, it is essential to re-examine language teaching in this respect. Therefore, this paper aims at reflecting on the extent to which teachers may equip students with language and skills and thus allow for developing successful relationships and rapport. The focus of the paper is to understand, analyse and describe why at least some of the great amount of universal as well as culture-specific etiquette rules should be explored in English language teaching and how teachers can do that. This paper, therefore, investigates which topics can be used to allow for fruitful interactions between teachers of languages and their students in this area. To ensure that suggested topics and activities are applicable in a diverse educational context, the activities are described in a rather general way. The primary objective is to inspire foreign language teachers to create authentic and meaningful classroom interaction on the base of digging into social etiquette with regard to the cross-cultural aspect. As a result, learners’ knowledge and skills will be enhanced in terms of building relationships and rapport in a foreign language. What is more, they will be able to interact in social situations with grace. To sum up, this paper looks into preparing often linguistically homogenous classrooms for a culturally diverse world in an effective way and a manner enjoyable for all parties involved.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3388