CulturiousEDCI 5085

Summer 2011

Manuela Wagner

What is culture?

• Definition of culture:

…culture is defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group. (http://www.carla.umn.edu/culture/definitions.html)

Would we like to/Do we need to teach culture in our language

classes?• Why/why not?

“One of the most significant threads of our account of language teaching has been the, sometimes uneasy, relationship between language teaching and culture teaching”

(Byram and Risager, 1999: 143)

ACTFL standards: 5 Cs

ACTFL standards

ACTFL STANDARDS

CULTURESGain Knowledge and Understanding of Other Cultures

• Standard 2.1: Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the practices and perspectives of the culture studied

• Standard 2.2: Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the products and perspectives of the culture studied

What could be some reasons why the teaching of intercultural communication is often omitted

in language classes?

Interlanguage Pragmatics

• There is a basic premise in interlanguage pragmatics—that it is not enough just to know the equivalent words and phrases in a second language (L2). Learners need to determine the situationally-appropriate utterances, namely:

• what can be said,• where it can be said,• when it can be said,• how to say it most effectively.

(Cohen, 2002; p. 1)

“…someone with some degree of intercultural competence is someone who is able to see relationships between different cultures - both internal and external to a society - and is able to mediate, that is interpret each in terms of the other, either for themselves or for other people. It is also someone who has a critical or analytical understanding of (parts of) their own and other cultures - someone who is conscious of their own perspective, of the way in which their thinking is culturally determined, rather than believing that their understanding and perspective is natural.”

Michael Byram (2000)

Rehbein (2006, p. 46ff)

(1) ((Telephone rings, Prof. Müller answers:))

(s1) Prof. Müller: Müller.

(s2) American woman: Professor Müller?

(s3) Prof. Müller: Am Apparat.

(Speaking. [Literally: at the apparatus])

(s4) American woman: Bitte?

(Pardon?)

(s5) Prof. Müller: Am Apparat.

(Speaking. [Literally: at the apparatus])

(s6) American woman: Wo ist er?

(Where is he?)

(s7) Ich verstehe nicht. (I don’t understand.)

(s8) Prof. Müller: Er spricht selbst zu Ihnen.

((smiling))(He is speaking to you himself.)

(s9) American woman: Bitte?

(Pardon?)

(s10) Prof. Müller: Er selbst spricht zu Ihnen.

((louder)) (He himself is speaking to you.)

(s11) American woman: Sprechen Sie Englisch(Do you speak English?)

(s12) Prof. Müller: Yes.

((whereupon introductions and further conversation are in English))

Humor• Original• *MST: No copies tu culo.• *INS: Copiar, no copies. Ok ¿Quién hizo esto?• [Students laugh]• *MST: J.• *INS: ¿Qué significa esto? [pointing at the board]• *MST: You know like… at the copy machine some people go• crazy like that [gesture]• *INS: Culo es ‘esto’ [pointing at her own]• *INS: No copies tu culo, ok, bien. Está bien.• [Students laugh]• *INS: Está bien…• [Students laugh]• *INS: Esta palabra no es muy… apropiada…• *MST: It’s in the radio• *INS: Se usa… sí, en España, se usa mucho culo como “tushy”.• *INS: En Latinoamérica es muy fuerte, muy grosero.• *INS: En España está bien.

Humor• Translation:• *MST: Don’t copy “your bum”.• *INS: Copiar, no copies. Ok. Who did that?• [Students laugh]• *MST: J.• *INS: What does that mean? [pointing at the board]• *MST: You know like… at the copy machine some people go• crazy like that [gesture]• *INS: “Culo” is ‘that’ [pointing at her own behind]• *INS: Don’t copy “tu culo,” ok, well. It’s okay.• [Students laugh]• *INS: It’s okay.• [Students laugh]• *INS: This word is not very… appropriate…• *MST: It’s in the radio• *INS: you use… well, in Spain, you use a lot “culo” like “tushy.”• *INS: In Latin America it is stronger, more impolite.• *INS: In Spain it is okay.

• The stuff was taught from classroom is quite rigid, inflexible and fixed facts, we have the impression that we need to strictly follow grammatical rules during communication with foreigners; otherwise we cannot make ourselves understood. In QA, we sometimes do not strictly follow grammar rules, the chat messages by QA partners sometimes is not grammatical either. And we still understood each other.

Zheng, Young, Brewer, Wagner, 2009

Intercultural CompetenceByram (2000)

– Attitudes: curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one's own.

– Knowledge: of social groups and their products and practices in one's own and in one's interlocutor's country, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction.

– Skills of interpreting and relating: ability to interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it and relate it to documents from one's own.

– Skills of discovery and interaction: ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices and the ability to operate knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction.

– Critical cultural awareness/political education: an ability to evaluate critically and on the basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices and products in one's own and other cultures and countries.

“Often we do not spend time (or do not have either the need or the opportunity) or the emotional and cognitive energy to learn about variation within cultures we perceive to be different from ours. Rather, we use superficially noticable events to make judgments, even based on one isolated incident, about the characteristics of an ethnic social group and to determine otherness.”(Smith & Mackie, 2000 as cited in Abrams, 2002, p.142)

Stereotypes

• What are stereotypes?• How did Abrams (2002) use stereotypes to teach

aspects of culture?

• What do you think about this?

Some resources

http://www.carla.umn.edu/culture/initiatives.html

http://www.cal.org/resources/Digest/0309peterson.html

http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=library.culture

http://langmedia.fivecolleges.edu/

www.sedl.org/loteced/lotelinks/lrcs.html