Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 5; September 03

Snakes or Cultural Role-reversal

Level: intermediate to advanced
Cultural aim: to help students realise the paradoxical rightness of opposed cultural standpoints
Preparation: none

In class:

• Dictate this text to the students:

  In Indonesia people avoid growing bushes round dwellings, as they do not want to make it easier for snakes to come hunting for food in their houses.
  A group of Indonesian graduates arrived on a campus in New Hampshire, USA, where they were to live for six months. Their dorm was surrounded by thick, leafy bushes.
  They tore bushes up and piled them up a good distance from the dorm.

• Explain to the students that they are to imagine it is the next day and that they are the College President. The President has just heard of the uprooting of the bushes. He writes a letter to the Indonesians. Explain that each student is to role-play the President and write a three paragraph letter to the strangers. Give the student 7-8 minutes for this.

• As the students finish the President letter, they hand it to the person on their right, so that Person B hands their letter to Person C and receives a letter from Person A, and so on round the group.

  Explain that each student is now the spokesperson of the Indonesian group. Tell them they have 7-8 minutes to write a three paragraph reply to the College President.

• As the students finish the Indonesian letter, they hand their letter to the person on their left. Person B receives an Indonesian letter from Person C and hands their Indonesian letter to Person A , and so on round the group. ( Editor, diagram needed)

• Now in role as College President, each student replies to the Indonesians

• Letter to the right…… the students write the Indonesian reply, concluding the correspondence.

• Letter to the left. Each President reads the second Indonesian letter.

• Round off the lesson with two of three triads reading their letters to the whole class.
  Ask the students how they felt as they role-reversed from one cultural stance into the other.