Identify a topic for your cultural project and reflect upon how this project relates to your language learning. State your learning goals for the project.
You need to be a member of The SDLAP Ning to add comments!
This reply was deleted.
Identify a topic for your cultural project and reflect upon how this project relates to your language learning. State your learning goals for the project.
You need to be a member of The SDLAP Ning to add comments!
Replies
International politics and religion seriously grasp my attention. I will do my cultural presentation on religion in Turkey because Turkey's return to Islam is especially important considering the history of the Ottoman Empire with religion and the elimination of religion in government after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
During the Ottoman Empire, which existed not too long ago, Turkey was an Islamic country, and it was not until the fall of the Ottoman Empire and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's time as president of Turkey that the significance of religion in Turkey changed. Ataturk believed that religion's heavy hand had a lot to do with why the Ottoman Empire did not succeed and he wanted to create a secular state that was not threatened by a doctrine of faith. He even went so far as to ban headscarves in public buildings (i.e. governmental, public universities, etc.). If an American president ever attempted to enact such a law, there would be an uproar of public outrage over such a distorted religious perspective. In that way though, Turkey differs from the United States. Turkey's rich history and conflict over religion led to a special circumstance where the people were enthused to see a secular state. Now however, Turkey is reverting to its non-secular ways with the current president placing a bigger emphasis on Islam in Turkey. I am very interested to see how this influences Turkey's future.
For my cultural presentation, I would like to learn about women's status in Korean society and introduce the issue of gender equality to my classmate. I will find out the gender gap in Korea compared to other countries. If there is gender gap, then I will explore the historical context and the traditional perception of women and men's roles in the society. I will also see how gender equality issue has changed since industrialization. I will also explain some typical phenomenon in the society that reflects on gender gap and list some statistics to support my finding. I also hope to learn what mechanism society is using to decrease gender gap and whether it is effective or not. I think gender equality issue is very important in every country as women historically were treated unequally. In a Confucius society, I wish to know how far Korea has long in promoting the status of women.
My topic for my cultural project is about the K-pop trainees. The reasons why I chose this topic is because there are so many people love to listen to kpop songs these days, which makes more and more Korean young people have the dreams of going on the stage and become a kpop star one day. However, before they can finally debut as a singer or an idol, there is a long journey they have to go through first, which is being a Kpop trainee in an entertainment company first. And the trainee life is very tough that not many people can handle it, so they will have no choice but to give up in the middle. However, those who "survive" during the tough trainee life, still have to wait for the company's decision of whether they can debut or not. So, it might take them more than ten years to debut as a singer.
Thus, after I found out these kinds of background of those kpop stars we see these days, I become very interested in knowing more about their trainee lives. Also, I think being a kpop trainee has become one of their cultures, and not many people have talked about this kind of topic, so I decide to use this as my materials for the cultural project.
I think the kpop trainees are part of their cultures nowadays, so it definitely relates to my language learning. Although, I am not going to be one of the trainees, but I think knowing deeper about this cultural product is very interesting.
For my cultural project, I would like to focus on the traditions surrounding marriage and weddings in Turkey. I feel that learning about marriage in another culture might be particularly interesting because in America I feel like the idea of marriage has begun to lose some of its value. Today, research suggests that 40-50% of married couple divorce in America. Therefore, I am interested in learning about how strongly Turkish individuals value marriage and the role that it plays within the culture. Additionally, I would like to explore the traditional aspects surrounding how couples typically decide to get married, whether marriages are decisions made by the couple themselves or their families. This project would introduce me to new vocabulary relating to family and significant others.
Many people have been giving their presentation on how competitive the Korean culture is and how Koreans tend to work extra-hard in terms of academics and their career. For my cultural project, I want to learn the reason behind it. And hopefully through this project I can learn what is good and bad about it so that I can pick something beneficial from learning the Korean competitive culture. Learning goals for this project would be talking about my semester in simple Korean, which is going to be one of the topics for my final evaluation as well. So this will be a good practice for me.
I would like to discuss a topic that many people brought up during their presentations, which revolved around food and drinks. In the Czech Republic, beer or pivo, and alcohol in general, is much different in terms of taste, social setting, and cultural meaning than the United States or Western countries. Their behaviour and attitude towards alcoholic reflects their reserved, yet social nature and their ability to control their drinking habits are reflected through their low crime rates, their sense of national pride, and their rise in contribution to the world economy.
In Korea, not many people know that drinking culture is very important to obtain and secure a job. If a boss wants to take everyone to drinks, it is extremely rude to reject him and will most likely result in the employee getting fired. In the Czech Republic and countries such as Turkey, Russia, Poland, and Hungary, drinks are a way to bond and socialize. It is more meaningful to have a discussion over a drink than to have a regular discussion. This is mostly likely due to the fact that in America, the culture has a tendency to be "fake", but under the influence of alcohol, people are more likely to be honest about what they say and because Czech people are well in control of holding their alcohol, they have the ability to connect on a deeper level. As someone who would like to work with Czech people or a Czech company one day, I know the importance of bonding with people from Central European countries through drinking and as I turn 21 in the summer, I know I must learn how to be in control in social settings.
For my cultural project I would like to focus on women's rights in Turkey. I am very inspired by how Turkey has come along way in their fight for gender equality and given the current cultural climate surrounding the topic I am intrigued to see how Turkey has served as a leader or in a way a rebel in the Middle East for breaking the status quo and granting women their legal rights. While Turkey has come along way, I also realize that just like in the States there is an ongoing battle for equal pay, access to education, as well as treatment of women. I hope to give a synopsis of the historical timeline as well as focus on education, employment, and marriage for women in Turkey. In addition, I plan to research key activists and female pioneers who have helped pave the way for gender equality in Turkey.
This project relates to learning the Turkish language, because if I am going to learn the language I should learn everything about the culture and as a woman I should have an understanding of legal rights afforded to them.
For our first cultural presentation, Sharon and I briefly discussed the traditional Korean clothing of hanboks. I would like to go more in depth with this topic to first discuss why hanboks are important and what they may symbolize. However, I would also like to go more in depth with how clothing has developed over time in Korean culture and to apply how it has developed to where it is now. I may also include other traditional Korean clothing and/or how the hanbok has been used for traditional fan dancing and how this shapes its culture.
Although I am pretty sure that this will be my cultural topic, I have also been considering another topic, which is to look at how specific soups are designed for special holidays. For example, Korean families usually eat dduk gook (rice cake soup) on New Year’s day and me-yuck gook (seaweed soup) on someone’s birthday. I would like to look at how these types of food had evolved over time and shaped Korean culture.
One of my goals for my learning plan includes trying to translate a short presentation in English to Korean. As a result, I can fulfill this goal by conducting research on my topic and making a presentation that is presented in English, which I can translate on my own time to accomplish this goal.
I love Korean food and I'm going to be spending some time in Korea later this year so for my presentation I will cover meeting people at a restaurant, ordering food, dining etiquette and farewells in Korean. This is something that I think is very related to my language goals and that I am interested in. In order to achieve this goal I will need to learn Korean words related to greetings, ordering food, different Korean foods, talking about food, and farewells.
I will talk about tourism in Turkey since I want to travel in Turkey someday. I will explain what is the current situation of the tourism industry. There are some issues like terrorism that affect the tourism in Turkey so I will research on how Turkish government is dealing with terrorism and advertise the tourism. I will also study what kinds of tourist attractions there are in Turkey and introduce them in the class. I also want to include how the sites are preserved (sustainability of the sites) since I am Geography major. I can include some vocabularies that can be used when I am traveling in Turkey.
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next