Culture Instruction

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 what distinguishes one group of people or a society from another in terms of their daily lives, thoughts, attitudes, activities, preferences, family life, and materialistic things such as clothing, music, art, building structure, and transportation choices, etc. It is all the things that connect  the majority of the people of the particular society that does not necessarily connect other the people of other societies.

Before taking this class I would have said that teaching culture was not at all important, but that it could still be used to engage students in the learning of the language. I would have said that I would probably teach some, but not make it an important part of the class. Now after all of the readings I have done for this class, I can definitely see the importance of including culture in the foreign language curriculum. The readings have brought up a lot of good points and good ideas.

Knowing the culture of the target language makes surviving and enjoying trips abroad more easy. You will be much more prepared for everything that will come at you during your time, short or long, abroad. The article I picked and read for this class weeks ago found that a student's level of previous cultural knowledge helped determine how much their language proficiency would improve during their study abroad program. Someone is also much more likely to actually use their foreign language skills depending on how much culture they have been exposed to. For example, if you are not familiar with the stereotype of Parisians being rude and the cultural understanding thereof, you may be more afraid and apprehensive to try to engage in any conversation or communication with these people. Knowing a people's culture helps you understand them and their ideas and therefore it helps you better interact with them.

It is definitely possible to teach culture in the classroom setting and the book does a nice job pointing out many ways it can be done, in my opinion. I would also say that it is essential that culture be taught before actual travel to those language-speaking places. At the same time, full immersion is obviously a great way to get to know a culture much more deeply as well, but not everyone is going to go abroad, but everyone needs to be taught to be able to look through things with different perspectives.

I do not think lecture, nor powerpoints, are an effective way to teach culture. I think exploratory activities using computers are often good activities, especially if students research different things and then present them to each other in varying ways so as not to bore the entire class. I think teaching vocabulary is a good time to bring up culture as well to give students the cultural difference between different words such as the example the book uses about "la maison" and "house." Comparing American culture versus the target culture is effective too, from my own experience.

Most of all, I think the teaching of culture should be focused on engaging students through interesting and amusing activities and topics. It may even be helpful to tell students some reasons why learning culture is important upfront, for some of the same reasons that we have read. Culture needs to be one part of language class that students enjoy; Otherwise the students will be disengaged and not get what they need to out of the culture instruction.