Multicultural Education through Miniature

Multicultural Education through Miniature (http://www.coedu.usf.edu/culture/photo.htm) is mainly about a doll collection that highlights over 300 handmade miniatures from over 80 countries and districts all over the world. Each doll was selected to depict the culture of the native country or region. There is always an interesting English story involved about the culture behind each doll. The target audience of this website can be students from K6 to K12 and teachers who teach culture-related courses, such as ESL, history and social studies. ESL students at intermediate level and above will be able to use materials provided by this site. The whole website is very well organized and user friendly. Information in the website is clear, substantial and intriguing.

One of the main characteristics that differs this website from many other ESL websites is that contents in this site integrate cultures into English learning. As I mentioned above, there is a culture-related story after every miniature. In the process of reading stories, ESL student can not only practice English, but also get to know some cultural facts. Therefore, this site enables ESL students to learn real contents rather than the language itself, which can be considered as a great tool for content-based ESL instruction.

Another characteristic of this site is the part of ‘activities’. In this part, learners get to play very interesting and interactive games, which are based on cultural facts. In this way, learners are more motivated to use English and to learn cultural knowledge while having fun at the same time.

In order to integrate this site into lesson plans of ESL classes, I will go to inquire what my ESL students have studied in history and social studies classes. For example, if they have learned some basic knowledge about Africa in a social studies class, I may select a miniature from Africa in this site and have them describe the miniature orally. After doing so, I will have them read a cultural story behind the miniature. Teachers can use the same reading material in different ways so as to improve all language abilities of ESL students. For instance, teachers can create a cloze practice on the basis of the story, and ask students to fill in the blank while teachers read the story; Teachers can divide the whole class into groups. Each group is responsible for reading one paragraph, and group members need to orally summarize main contents of each paragraph. By doing so, we can take care of development of all language skills of students. Also, theses engaging materials in this site can be used as after-class reading materials and practices. Through reading these stories and playing the carefully designed games provided, students can practice English and broaden horizons while having a good time.

Personally, I enjoyed reading stories in this site and play games, such as Jigsaw puzzles of countries, crossword puzzles based on famous foods, Tic-Tac-Toe based on primary languages in different countries, which are novel and interesting .The two weaknesses of the website I noticed are: firstly, the information provided on this website is usually not most up-to-date due to the limitation of the format of doll collection exhibition; secondly,  this website cannot help students learn systematically and thoroughly on one topic, where additional resources need to be added.

To sum up, in spite of the downside mentioned above, Multicultural Education through Miniature is a great website which is appropriate for ESL instruction.