Lesson 1 Topic: General information about notions of "culture". Intercultural communication Aim

Lesson 1 Topic: General information about notions of "culture". Intercultural communication Aim: to introduce notions of culture, elements of culture and (inter)cultural awareness Materials: A4 paper, projector, lab-top, DVD, film, whiteboard, colored crayons Warm up: Give ss sheets of paper and ask them to write the following: left bottom – favorite number right bottom – name of the dearest person upper left – the place where you would like to go/you have been upper right – favorite national dish center – name

Notions of culture
All living cultures are outcomes of intercultural communication. Human history is the tale of such journeys. Becomes particularly evident in the globalization era where the ever-fast evolving cultural landscape is characterized by an intensified diversity of peoples, communities and individuals who live more and more closely. The increasing diversity of cultures, which is fluid, dynamic and transformative, implies specific competences and capacities for individuals and societies to learn, re-learn, and unlearn so as to meet personal fulfilment and social harmony. The ability to decipher other cultures in fair and meaningful ways is predicated not only on an open and pluralistic spirit but also on self-cultural awareness. When a culture is critically aware of its own strengths and limitations, it can extend its horizons and enrich its intellectual and spiritual resources by learning from alternative visions in epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and worldviews.

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  Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
  
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  Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.
  
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  Culture is communication, communication is culture.
  
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  Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
  
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  A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
  
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  Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.
  
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  Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
  
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  Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.
  
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  Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.