ESL 2305 - Language, Culture, and Cross- cultural Interaction

Credits: 3

The course will engage students in critical inquiry about the relationship between language and culture, which defines humans’ outlook on the world. Students will learn about diverse cultures and languages so that they acquire an integrative understanding of the shared human values across significant differences. Metaphorically put, the course will help students ‘figure out the foreigners’ and ‘step out and fit in around the world’. The course will focus on language universals, on different linguistic ways used in communication by different societies, and on some effective strategies for appropriately addressing the challenges posed to cross-cultural communication by cultural and linguistic diversity. The course may be used as a course that satisfies some of WSSU’s general education requirements as well as an elective course for students majoring in elementary education with an academic concentration in TESL.