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VI- Bibliography …………………………………………………………….. 8

Outline

I- Introduction …………………………………………………………….. 2

II- The influence of the host educational environment ………………… 2

Foreign Methodologies ……………………………………………... 2

Foreign culture and traditions ……………………………………… 3

III- The influence of the local culture and the local teacher's groups on the classroom environment ………………………………………………….. 4

The influence of the local culture …………………………………… 4

The local teacher's groups on the classroom environment ………... 5

IV- Reaching Conformity among all the overlapping cultures ………….. 6

V- Conclusion ……………………………………………………………...... 7

VI- Bibliography …………………………………………………………….. 8

I- Introduction:

Throughout this paper I will talk about my own 5^th grade classroom when I was a teacher at Al-Sham Oasis Private School. The influence of our Syrian national culture largely affected the culture of the host educational environment intended to teach students English using foreign methodologies and foreign course books. The struggle between the two cultures ended by adhering to both of them and reaching a kind of conformity inside the classroom.

II- The influence of the host educational environment:

The influencesof the host educational environment on the classroom culture can be classified under two types:

1- Foreign Methodologies:

Al-Sham Oasis private school uses the Houghton Mifflin course for learning English through reading stories, science, and Math. Houghton Mifflin courses follow theCooperative Learning approach that tend to teach the American learners in their L1 to work in teams, provide each other with feedback, challenge reasoning and conclusions, and most importantly, teach and encourage one another, and make the classroom environment student-centered rather than teacher centered. Teachers, in this method, should be integrationist as they should follow "skill based, discovery-oriented, collaborative pedagogy" allowing "classroom practice" and "team-oriented" discussions (Holliday, Appropriate Methodology and Social Context 1994). Teachers of English in this school try to follow this method which is foreign to our country. They teach their students English knowing that it is only a foreign language here and use foreign methodologies which seem difficult and strange to most students.

Adhering to the host educational environment, I used to divide the class in groups and read some stories in English and students should participate in discussions based on the events happening within the story or predicting what it's going to happen next. They should be able to make associations on their own between words or phrases and their meaning, induce certain structures and study in groups to answer the written exercises on their workbooks. However, learning wasn't just as easy as it was supposed to be especially for new students coming to school every year. The new students had difficulty in integrating within the classroom discussions or reading and comprehending large amount of vocabulary used within the course which they thought they had to memorize based on their prior knowledge of the collectionist "didactic, content based" methodologies commonly used in Syria. They felt anxious about the exams and considered working in groups and discovery oriented tasks as trivial games and kept on asking me about the examination questions and the things they had to focus on inside the course books. They had difficulty in inducing grammar rules out of texts and understanding unfamiliar words through their contexts.

Mahrous and Ahmed in their article "A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Students’ Perceptions of the Effectiveness of Pedagogical Tools: The Middle East, the United Kingdom, and the United States" talk about the pedagogy implemented in the Middle East within public institutions in particular. They suggest that it depends "solely on lectures, rote learning, and dictation" since "Teaching consists simply of illustrating concepts and reading from textbooks" Furthermore, "the assessment of students relies almost entirely on examinations" that reward the "passive absorption of knowledge" depending on memorizations and rarely do they have any " questions requiring students to employ what they have learned to situations outside the classroom." (2010: 291).This is really a sharp contrast with the pedagogic and assessment systems in the United States which usually focus on interactive education and exams based on assignments that bring up the students understanding and ability to negotiate meaning alongside with the syntactical structure. Houghton Mifflin course books employ foreign strategies that our students in Syria should be trained previously for before they are able to function efficiently inside classrooms but still it was the host educational requirements to adhere to them.

2. Foreign culture and traditions:

Having chosen Houghton Mifflin as a course material by the management of the school (the host educational environment) affects the class environment and the interaction among students and between teachers and students in another aspect. Houghton Mifflin is originally designed for American students and their own cultures and norms of conduct. They speak about Jewish and Christian traditions and celebrations. They don't mention any celebrations related to the the Muslim culture. They call Palestine as Israel and they show children at the same age of the students (especially in the elementary and secondary schools) leaving their parents and homes to live alone or work for the summer vacation and this is considered strange for the students and even caused some problems for their parents. The diversity of cultures found in America (like having Chinese, African American, Mexican, and Indian) already identified within the students' textbooks caused a lot of troubles with me inside classrooms as the students were not familiar with ideas, customs and discussions among students were relatively limited. Students lacked the motivation they needed for the learning process to continue with the same Cooperative Learning approach. Parents also couldn't accept having their children taught about certain ideas like the sanctity of the Jewish religion for example. It is fixed in their minds that the image of the Jewish people should stay as the conquerors who took over Palestine and killed the Palestinian people.

Teaching a foreign language goes inseparably along with teaching the foreign culture itself. All the components of culture, such as beliefs and customs are described by language and helping the students themselves to speak the language efficiently inside classrooms is a way of forcing this culture upon them. Pica in her article "Questions from the Language Classroom: Research Perspectives", suggests that learner's cultural integration within the target language is necessary for learning a foreign. This is something which "troubles teachers as "they work with students in classrooms far removed from the culture of the language they are learning" (1994: 70). Having foreign culture adds to the complexity of the teaching- learning process and serves as an effective factor to the success or failure of this process.

III- The influence of the local culture and the local teacher's groups on the classroom environment:

1- The influence of the local culture:

Students in Syria are expected to regard teachers as absolute authorities inside the class and students are not encouraged to make any kind of research about any topic or engage in group or team activities unless they are directly ordered to do so. This educational background, along with the collectionist pedagogy cause the lack of problem-solving and communication skills among the students. With the growing importance of learning English inside our community, parents tend to send their children to private schools where they will supposedly have better chances in improving their efficiency in English. That further increased the focus of most private schools on the integrationist methodology of teaching. However, what is taught is different from what is learnt. As the students move to student-centered classrooms, they need to adjust their ways of studying. So, no more exam oriented studying where they rely on instructors to summarize what they need to study and no more receiving and repeating information. This turning point is not an easy step to accomplish.

From my personal experience boys started to appear very interested in the new method where they have to learn to learn and win competitions and have fun at the same time. However, girls due to sociocultural and religious influences of their macro culture had some difficulties in integrating with groups including boys and felt timid to participate inside the classroom. They showed a kind of understanding and integration within the learning process whenever I checked their group. However, in reality they were too shy to admit their incomprehension of everything that was going on. The contrast between the deep and the surface actions was largely caused by the sociocultural influence of the classroom environment. Collier in his book A Film Study in Classrooms in Western Alaska (1979) distinguishes between "two patterns". The first one is "when the teacher's pace is different from that of her or his pupils, resulting in low flow. The second pattern is when the teacher's pace is in harmony with that of pupils, resulting high flow". I consider the act of these girls as "low flow" as they hide their ignorance of everything that is happening inside the classroom. The reason for such a "low flow" inside the classroom is because of the influence of the local culture on the classroom environment.

2- The local teacher's groups on the classroom environment:

Strict boundaries separated the English subject used in Houghton Mifflin course from the other subjects which were mainly similar to any state school in Syria following a kind of communicative approach yet demanding dictation, memorization, exam oriented environment, and other collectionist features. Those course books are obligatory in Syrian schools everywhere and the huge differences between English teaching and Arabic teaching methodologies caused a lot of problems on the sides of the students and the teachers as well. Students were supposed to have ideas about the topics mentioned in their English classes in their L1 at least before actually discussing them inside the class. Some students lacked the information required for the Cooperative Learning approach and didn't integrate with other students within their group which created a "low flow" again between the students themselves (as they are supposed to learn from each other) and a "low flow" between me and them. Even as teachers inside the teachers' room, Arabic teachers used to sit separately thinking that they are the ones responsible for teaching the main subjects like Math, Arabic, science, social studies, and religion and putting the final marks on the students' final marksheet. They belonged to the collectionist culture observing different subjects with strict boundaries among them. Having a variety of teacher groups inside the same school made the students familiar with both of the collectionst and integrationst methodologies in different subjects and made the students prefer the easy way of sitting still while the teacher is explaining and answering all their questions.

IV- Reaching Conformity among all the overlapping cultures:

Understanding the "social context of English language education" helps to "achieve appropriate classroom methodologies" as Halliday (1986: 13) suggests. With all the "great deal of research" done in the "English language education", however, there are no "classroom methodologies appropriate for different situations". The teacher should consequently become more of a researcher to find out what suits his classroom environment best. From my experience, within the environment of my classroom, I tried to understand the problems of my students and did my best to overcome them. Having a better connection with my students allowed me to have closer look on their micro cultures and helped me understand their problems so that I could find solutions to their problems even if it meant not completely adhering to the school strict methodologies of teaching English.

Guiding the students within their groups and motivating them to participate in research outside classroom helped them a lot within the classroom environment. Motivating them to use the school library and read books or watch videos about the American culture or the topics involved in their book helped them a lot. I tried to skip the topics that are somehow offending to some people as much as I could and focused on things that motivated the students through their learning process. Conforming to all the overlapping major factors influencing the classroom is the best way to deal with classroom culture. It is really a culture where the teacher should be concerned with the "social interaction" happening "within and around classroom language teaching and learning which affects and therefore helps explain what really goes on" (p:11)

V- Conclusion:

As Breen suggests in his study "The social context of language learning –a neglected situation" (1986), classroom interaction depicts a combination of different and sometimes conflicting cultures of the "internal world of the individual and the social world of the group" (p: 144). Holliday again emphasizes in his book Appropriate Methodology and Social Context (1994: 128) that "classroom culture" is a combination of "wider […] complex of interrelated and overlapping cultures of different dimensions within the host educational environment". Halliday states the interrelated cultures involved as the following "host institution, student, professional academic, wider international education-related and national cultures" (p:30) All of them overlap and determine the kind of classroom environment happening within any class.