Meal time comparison between USA and Colombia
A daily schedule for an average American office worker
begins waking up at 6:00, getting the children ready for school bus, at 7:00
am, the family will have a breakfast including a cereal, eggs, toasts, coffee
or juice. Most of them will take a lunch box previously prepared basically with
a sandwich, hamburger or hot dog for mid-day, because they will have a 20
minutes short brake for children and 30 minutes brake as lunch time for adults.
Children begin school around 7:30 am and finish about 1:30 pm. Adults begin
their 8 hour shift at 9:00 and end up at 5:00 pm.
As we can see Lunch doesn´t have the same meaning as
it has in our culture, for us lunch has been the main meal for many years, it´s
an important moment to share with our families usually between 12:00 mid-day to
2:00 pm., although this has been changing depending on the type of activity we
do, now we don´t share with our relatives as we used to, but lunch stills our
main meal.
Holidays and Beliefs
In the USA there are officially ten holidays: New
Year, Christmas, labor bay, thanksgiving, Memorial Day, veteran´s day,
Columbus, Independence, Washington´s and Martin Luther King´s birthdays, none
of them is a religious commemoration like in our country, where we have
seventeen holidays per year half of them religious. We share some with the
American customs as: New Year, and Christmas, and the Independence and Labor
Day, but in different days.
Our traditional holy week is only celebrated by
Christians in the USA and is not an official holiday, it is called Easter and
is celebrated by children looking for plastic eggs decorated, filled and hid
previously with candies or small gifts. In other states of the USA is called
Eastern Bunny that consist of someone with a rabbit costume going around giving
candies and gifts to children.
Due to the huge population with so many foreign, from
different countries and different beliefs the American society is kind of
neutral regarding religion, opposite to our culture based on Christianity and
Catholicism.
Families in USA just like in our culture are the
foundation of the society, having elder people as the backbone for the group.
Values are the same in both cultures, although there
is a lot more respect in the North American culture no matter how you look or
how you´re dressed up. Globalization has affected society around the world no
matter where you are, everyday family members don´t share time as they use to.
The improper use of technology has become a gap, which is making us
solitaries.
The most
relevant concepts about Language Culture and Learning
A way to approach a foreign language is having contact
with the country´s culture trough out authentic material in context, managing
daily life situations, giving learners the possibility to have contact,
recognize, understand and define different attitudes and behaviors from another
society, which probably would make them appropriate deeply the second language.
The best way to accomplish the sociocultural
competence when learning English Language, is having an open mind ready to
accept different attitude, values, behaviors, opinions and habits, which might
go against our own culture, but having this comparisons will let us appropriate
the second language as a new opportunity, a new world a new life.
