Discusson #6: Teaching culture

In your view, what is culture? Is it important to teach L2 culture? Why? Is it possible to teach L2 culture in the classroom setting? What are the limitations? How should culture be learned or taught? Use examples to support your points of view. 

Culture is an important part of the identity of a person because it affects their behaviors and perspectives on the world.  If you want to get to know someone, it helps to get to know their culture because of the influence it has on them.  Culture is made up of beliefs and traditions that belong to a certain group of people.  Often someone’s culture is defined the same as their nationality (i.e. French, Costa Rican, Haitian) but culture is not confined by national borders.  The most obvious example is of indigenous peoples or ethnic groups (Native American culture, Quechua culture, Roma culture). 

It is very important to teach L2 culture.  I like the example on the first page of Chapter 8, where the teacher points out that it is even more important for a student who will never leave Georgia to study foreign language precisely because he will never leave Georgia.  He may be a great guy and live a very content life in Georgia, but he may not be exposed to many different cultures there.  He may not know what to think of different cultures if he does encounter them; and he might not be open to tolerating something he’s never been exposed to, for instance.  Fostering cultural understanding and tolerance in students seeps into other parts of life – learning to accept that others are different from you is a lesson we spend a lot of time teaching children and one we often have to remind ourselves of in adulthood.

It is possible to teach L2 culture in the classroom to a certain extent – the easiest manifestation of that would be lessons on holidays in the target culture.  There are some really interesting and far-out festivals that go on in other cultures that are totally foreign to us, and often students are fascinated by the ways holidays are celebrated in other cultures.  That also provides the opportunity for some valuable self-reflection about our own holiday traditions that we take for granted. 

What’s a little harder to teach is attitudes and how they differ in other countries.  Anecdotes are the best way I can think of to compare how people behave in their day to day lives.  For instance, almost all of the host parents I knew of when I studied in Spain made the meals for the students.  I know my host mom didn’t even let me put the food on the plate; the full plate was waiting for me when I sat down. When I first arrived I asked if I could help with various kitchen tasks, and she turned me down for all of them, so I stopped offering.  There weren’t enough seats when we ate in the kitchen so she would eat standing up while my father, sister, and I ate, or she would eat after us or take the first empty seat when someone finished.  This rigid domestic role for the mother is a little outdated in our culture but it is not unusual in Spain.  I don’t know how I would convey this to students other than by telling them the story.  Luckily, I do think they enjoy when I tell personal anecdotes, because they are interested in something that really happened.

Of course, the best way to experience culture is to live in it (insert study abroad plug here).  Living in a foreign country allows you to immerse yourself in all the nuances that you’d never catch onto in a classroom. 

Teaching culture in a classroom should be a multimedia experience - you need to use authentic material to show what life is like in other countries.  Interviews with natives, music from the target culture, lots of photos, and any useful videos you can find are a must.  Images and sounds can make you feel closer to something that you’re unfamiliar with.  Getting a native speaker in to talk about his/her own culture would be fantastic.  It’s also important to draw connections to the students’ own culture - that way, a foreign culture won’t seem quite so foreign after all.