I was at a STARTALK conference a few years ago, where I sat at a table with teachers of several languages. The topic of student choice came up, and I said something like, "A lot of my students go right for Spongebob. Even my college students think he's funny." One older Hindi teacher sitting across from me gave a deep scowl, which I interpreted as "We need to teach about the culture of the target language, and nothing else." I've since then thought about roles for target culture instruction, in terms of a balance with what learners themselves want to talk about.
One benefit I've noticed in learning about culture is that I find it useful, interesting, and fun to gain insights on who speaks these languages. Where do they live? What do they eat? What do they do? This third question reminds me of my own time living in China, where a lot of my conversations revolved around things that were Chinese, like local events and geography, as well as things that were not Chinese, like foreign movies, books, and music. I remember having long discussion about Game of Thrones in Chinese with an MA classmate. I have also noticed a cost to doing target-culture-only activities, particularly when the information is new to many learners in a classroom. This has to do with who possesses the knowledge required to contribute to the conversation, and who does not. Implicitly, expert/non-expert roles emerge. Only the teacher, and possibly one or a few students who have spent time in the target language community, can be experts. Everyone else is left to be non-experts, without relevant knowledge to contribute. Non-experts are forced to either ask receptive questions ("what's that?"), or to remain passive as listeners. By contrast, in a whole-class story collaboration, the teacher can contribute cultural knowledge in the forms of locations, people, foods and other things from the target language community, and learners can contribute knowledge from their own experience and preferences. This also allows learners to use any language (words or longer utterances) they can at any given point in time. But a culture-only discussion requires participants to know the exact language for what the teacher has presented as relevant in each moment. This restricts the selection space in both language and content that participants can offer as relevant. Again learners are left as passive receivers of language and knowledge, prohibited from active contributions. Given more time, I did see my own college students begin to recycle Chinese historic people, places, and foods into our later discussions, after they had gotten to know these people from my recurring introductions. So I'm not arguing here for the abolition of culture-presentations. But I am advising that teachers consider both the benefits and costs of this practice, to find a balance.
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Reed Riggs (Author)
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