This annual plan is a grid view of how an annual plan with an intercultural focus could be done.

Inside the unities, the students will have specific grammar lessons. This will not be shown in this grid because it is not the main focus of the plan.

The annual plan is made for an 8th-grade in a typical Danish public school, where the students have English three times a week.

Below you will find a short explanation of the seven unites the students will work with during the school year 2018-2019. After this, you will find a full grid of the annual plan, with aims, activities and materials explained explicitly. You can find a printeble version of the text and grid with amins in the pdf-file below.

 

 

 

Cultural focus points from ‘Comment goals’ (FFM)

Intercultural contact

The students have to work with reflection about culture and culture meetings, both with those meeting the students experiences themselves, witness and acquires acquaintance with though texts. Culture meetings involve therefore values and by keeping an open and curious approach, the students have to be able to apply the English course to understand and discuss these conditions in English.

Students should be ‘dressed’ to avoid stereotypes and misunderstandings by working with potential conflict points and cultural meetings. On the basis of intercultural understanding, they should ultimately be able to act independently and flexibly in more spontaneous meetings, which also deal with knowledge of English-language cultures and social conditions.

The teaching should be based on texts that are relevant to the students as well while providing a balanced perception of cultural and social conditions in English-language areas over time.
 

English as access to the world

Students should work with several types of linguistic variants, partly regional and social, and partly different registers, eg through film and media and across written and oral genres. Students should be able to identify the most important language features that characterize the different variants.

Finally, students should be able to talk about how the language is coloured by the contexts it encompasses so that possible conflicting points in cultural meetings are understood and avoided.

 

Texts and media

Students should be able to assess texts in relation to genre and language use through the work on a wide range of texts on subjects of personal, cultural and social relevance.

Students should have knowledge about structure and function in multimodal media. Students should be able to search and disseminate information to different recipients in a coherent language-adapted genre.

Students should be able to match the style and content of the sender, intent and recipient, and the goal is that they should be able to apply varied text types in different media independently.

The students' own media consumption is involved as a resource in the workplace.

(https://www.emu.dk/omraade/gsk-lærer/ffm/engelsk/8-9-klasse/kultur-og-samfund)

 

The seven units

 

Boys and girls

The boys and girls course will stretch over a period of four weeks. This course will give the students a view of how it is to be a teenager in another country in the world. The course will have a focus on teenagers in both England, USA and France. The reason for choosing these particular countries is to reach the aims of the ‘comment goals’ by giving the students insight into English-speaking countries and to prepare them for a later course, where they will be speaking to French students.

The course will have a big focus on telling about stereotypes and thereafter breaking them down.

When looking at ‘Comment Goals’, this cause will cover following points:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colonial history

This course will consist of a four week period, with a focus on mainly British colonial history, but also serve as a short introduction to Danish colonial history and the next course.

          The objective here is to introduce the students to the subject of colonial history and the cultural clashes that occurred during that period of time. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the course also serves as a scaffolding unit, preparing the students to work with the content and assignments of the cross-curricular and intercultural course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cross-curricular and intercultural course

This course will be cross-curricular between English and History and will pick up on the “Danish colonial history”-aspect of the previous course. The students will form groups and prepare online presentations, which they will present to groups of students in a French class (who have prepared presentations about French colonial history). Furthermore, different assignments and conversational topics will be scaffolded for the Danish and the French students throughout the eight week period. The main objective of this course is to further develop the intercultural competencies of the participating students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Big cities in the USA

This course will stretch over eight weeks where the students will ‘visit’ some of the biggest cities in the USA. They will be introduced to a new city every week.

The reason for during such a course is to introduce and educate to the students about both small and big cultures inside a country and even a city.

When looking at ‘Comment Goals’, this cause will cover following points:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great Britain and India

This is a four-week course. As a continuance of the course ‘Colonial history’, the students will work with the newer historie between Great Britain and India. They will get an insight into how the relationship has developed between these two nations since India became its own. They will also learn about the term ‘Colonial blame’, and how this term has had an impact on the British society. There will again be focused on breaking down stereotypes.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

South Africa

This course will stretch over a period of four weeks and will be a cross-curricular course with the subject social studies. The course will be a modified version of Gyldendals course on South Africa. There will be a focus on the political development in the country from Apartheid to a democracy so that the students can compare this development with the one we have had in Denmark.