As EFL teachers we must bear this fact in mind and I will return to this point later in the article. At any rate, it seems the navy was looking for a way to increase the cultural awareness of their sailors in hopes of reducing the number of often diplomatically embarrassing incidents between US sailors on shore leave and the local population. In Greece, for example, a lack of understanding of the local culture resulted in a US sailor assaulting a shopkeeper. If properly done, this can stimulate thinking about stereotypes, how cultural barriers are created, and about the profound impact of cultural differences in general. It is forbidden to explain the rules of either culture to visitors so the only means of understanding is observation and trial and error participation.
Greetings are highly formulaic.
As mentioned above BaFa BaFa was initially designed for the navy. While it has been used with people all over the world, those people, for example, educators, corporate managers, and government workers, often bring with them near-native English fluency. Using BaFa BaFa with university EFL students is more difficult and problematic in several ways. In the end my co-director and I decided to do away with the taped instructions entirely because we felt the need to simplify the simulation in a number of minor ways which of course rendered the taped instructions useless. Fresh out of the box, there are several areas which in my opinion are simply too difficult for the most EFL students to successfully master in the short training time available.