Thomas CP #4

For our cultural workshop this past Tuesday, we talked about classroom behaviors and customs. Since we will be future EFL teachers in a foreign country, this is relevant and pretty important to us so we don't run into any cultural mishaps. I learned a lot of things from my partners’ classroom cultures as well as somethings from my own classroom culture. For example, I wasn’t sure if it was acceptable for teachers in the US to admit a mistake since it would make the teacher look bad, and that is how I was taught in this TEFL class (avoid saying "I don’t know", say you’ll get back to them the next day). Some things I learned from my partners is that in Saudi Arabia there are no co-ed schools; as a result there are no opportunities for group work with the opposite gender. In Vietnamese elementary schools, they are taught to raise their arms in a specific 90 degree angle if they have questions, unlike in the US where there’s no such restriction on how you raise your hand. This is loosened in higher education, such as high school. All in all, I learned some interesting information from this session and this will increase my awareness of the cultural differences in the classrooms of foreign countries.