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Problems:

  • teachers' own understanding of culture and how they propagate their knowledge to the students
  • the importance given to culture in class evaluation is minimal
  • the students' level of language knowledge might impede teachers in presenting complex cultural aspects

Schulz: 11

The Portfolio

Important questions:

C culture, c culture or k kulture?

Possible solutions:

  • Robinson's "color purple"
  • Kramsch's "third culture"
  • using mass media material in teaching (Lopez Fernandez, 58)
  • culture portfolio (Schulz, 18)

How do we avoid stereotyping? Oversimplifying one's national culture is a danger to be avoided

teaching aspects of culture in language classes

stereotype

oversimplification

Are Spanish people lazy and sexist? Are British cold and formal? Are Americans superficial and workaholics?

high culture, unappealing to the students

piropos

snobs

The explicit teaching of culture often, if not always, depends on stereotypes and ideologically fraught simplifications or, at the least, someone-in-particular's notions of culture (that "someone" usually being the curriculum designer, the teacher, or the textbook writer).

Schulz, 11

The teacher's attitude is a good place to start: "it is very important to emphasize that one culture is not above the others, they are simply different" (Lopez: 10).

siesta

Objectives (in Schulz, based on Byram and Kramsch):

1. awareness of geographical, historical, economic, social, political factors that have an impact on cultural perspectives, practices, products and language

2. awareness of power differentials and social roles: age, gender, class, religion, ethnicity and place of residence

3. students recognize stereotypes and generalizations

4. awareness of culture-specific connotations, words, proverbs, phrases, idiomatic constructions

5. awareness of causes for cultural misunderstanding between different cultures

(Schulz, 18)

Culture teaching – a dynamic, not a static and factual process.

Hamburger culture

What is culture?

Thank you and have a lovely day!

Teaching Culture in the Language Classroom

Avoiding Cultural Stereotypes

Catalina Chiuaru

SLA

3rd semester

Culture has its merited place in second language teaching.

the possibility to place their learning within real space and time

understanding the context for the language being studied

“language does not exist in a void, but in a social context” (own translation, Lopez: 6).

Bibliography

  • López Fernández, C. (2005) El componente cultural en la enseñanza de ELE a través de los medios de comunicación y su aplicación en el aula. Memoria de Máster. Universidad de Salamanca.
  • Kramsch, C. (2006) Culture in Language Teaching. En Andersen, H.L., Lund, K. & Risager, K. (eds.).
  • Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003) Beyond Methods. Macrostrategies for Language Teaching. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
  • Schulz, R. (2007) "The Challenge of Assessing Cultural Understanding in the Context of Foreign Language Instruction" in Foreign Language Annals, 40, 1.
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