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Learning reflections from “Cross-Cultural Awareness in Teaching English as a Second Language”
Sunday, corresponding to 03/19/2023, Everyone Academy in coordination with the Department of English at the Islamic University Gaza (IUG) organized an educational webinar entitled “Cross-Cultural Awareness in Teaching English as a Second Language”. This event took place at the hall of the Central Library of the Islamic University-Gaza.
The webinar was delivered by Dr. Abeer Jaber AbuIyada who hold her PhD in Management & Organization from the Institute of Social Sciences at Yıldırım Beyazıt University in Ankara-Turkey; Dr. Mahmoud Baroud; Head of the English Language Department at the Islamic University Gaza (IUG); and Mr. Aziz Soubai; the co-founder of Everyone Academy. In addition, a number of academics, teachers, researchers, school students and students of the English Language Department were involved throughout the webinar both physically and virtually.
This webinar comes within the endeavors made by Everyone Academy with the mission to encourage online collaboration among individuals and teachers all over the word. In addition, it comes within the interest of the Islamic University to strengthen the cultural awareness of English department students and to raise their competencies in the skill of communicating across different cultures in the field of teaching and learning English as a second language. Moreover, it comes to promote the idea of getting to know different cultures as one of the basic skills in learning English as a second language. This will enable students to communicate with the outside world, learn about their cultures, and compare aspects of differences and similarities between their mother culture and other cultures.
During the meeting, Dr. Abeer Jaber AbuIyada stressed the importance of the role that culture plays in learning and teaching English as a second language, as it is an indispensable fifth skill and no less important than the four basic English language skills - speaking, listening, reading and writing, and has even become one of the basic requirements. For teachers and students of English to be qualified and able to communicate well with different cultures to raise their competencies and enable them to teach and learn English as a second language.
Dr. Abeer also discussed a set of cultural problems that teachers face in teaching English as a second language. She also pinpointed some fundamental strategies teachers may use to overcome these cultural problems, including but not limited to: personalization, validating interpretations, making cultural comparisons and understanding different associations and semantics of the words and structures of native speakers of the English language using examples inspired by the Palestinian English curriculum.
At the end of the meeting, a short video was porodcasted to all attendees about the concept of "cultural shock and ways of adaptation”. Dr. Abeer also stressed the importance of cultural awareness to adapt and reach a stage of accepting the differences and similarities between different cultures. It is worth noting that this educational webinar was in a live broadcast via the Facebook page in cooperation with the "Everyone's Academy" institution that encourages cooperation and participation via the Internet between individuals and teachers from all countries of the world, within the framework of scientific and cultural exchange between the Everyone Academy and other educational institutions. .
Sunday, 19/03/2023
Dr. Abeer Jaber AbuIyada
Management & Organization, P
