Is it multilingualism a threat for our traditions?

Globalisation is a widespread fact in our society we cannot avoid when teaching festivals and traditions. Halloween is not just celebrated in United States, but it is also around the world. For example, Spain has its own festivity the same day that Halloween is celebrated; however, more and more people is adopting such foreign tradition. Is it an advantage or a drawback?

Advantages and drawbacks

• Let's see the advantages that globalisation and multilingualism bring in our society:

- Society adopts an open mind towards other cultures. 

- It is easier to learn more about other cultures, beliefs, values...

- Cultures can express themselves with total freedom.

- It is easier to learn new languages and ways of communication.

• On the other hand, some drawbacks we may find are the following ones: 

- We may lose our traditions and our sense of belonging to a country, so if everything is globalised and celebrated everywhere, there is nothing special that make us different regarding our traditions and festivals. 

- We can have acces to culture whenever we want, so we may lose interest for it. In fact, when we have an excess of information, we tend to undervalue what we can get easily from Internet or wherever.

Conclusions

In short, despite all the positive and negative points multilingualism brings in our society, I consider that we teachers may make use of it to work festivals and traditions in class. However, we should take into account a relevant issue: the inability of many teachers to teach culture through language. That's why I would propose activities in which pupils can develop communication skills (oral and written).For instance, students can prepare presentations about the different festivals and traditions we may find around the world; thereby, pupils would be working culture while developing their English oral skills.

 

 Another alternative would be taking advantage of multilingualism in class to engage (not to force) students from other countries to tell their classmates more about their cultures. Actually, the great majority of times we have in class the resources necessary to work culture, but we do not realise about them; that's why we are always looking for innovation when, in fact, we do not need to implement new approaches to plan a fun and interesting class about culturals aspects.