WHAT IS A CITY’S CULTURE? A SAMPLE OF CULTURAL TRAINING FOR ESP STUDENTS
WHAT IS A CITY’S CULTURE? A SAMPLE OF CULTURAL TRAINING FOR ESP STUDENTS

Summary/Abstract: Culture is an essential part of foreign language teaching and nowadays the academic linguistic training of our students should definitely take into consideration the discussion of the relationship between language and culture. Both ESP (English for Specific Purposes) courses and seminars should try to facilitate the transfer of such knowledge that would equip our students with the necessary skills to cope with a world under a rapid transformation, a world challenged by the cultural diversity, the technological development and, more recently, by a pandemic that has started to re-shape the way in which we live and connect with each other. The aim of the paper is to give a sample of how such a cultural training could easily be put into practice during an ESP seminar that could deal with the way in which cities carry in them the idea of culture. We may not find New York, one of the largest cities in the world, so easy to get to, but we can definitely learn so many things about it. One such tool to get to learn about the culture of a such an amazing city is to watch a stand-up comedy Colin Quinn: The New York Story (2016, director: Jerry Seinfeld; writer: Colin Quin), available on Netflix, a TV special that manages to capture, in a funny way, the history of all the immigrants coming to the city in the 20th century. The stand-up comedy obviously does that in a very funny way, that facilitates not only the mere discovery of the history of New York immigrants, but also the cultural clashes (or not) that make up New York as it is nowadays. Students are shown how we can learn about the American culture by looking at the dimensions of urban life, seeing its culture and diversity, grasping some ways to represent the city from the perspective of those who live in it and those who may never get to see it.

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