Raising Cultural Consciousness …We want to urge teachers to make schooling equally strange for all students and thus to expand the ways of thinking, knowing and expressing knowledge of all students through incorporating many cultural tendencies. -- Shirley Brice Heath and Leslie Mangiola

Three “simple” questions  Why teach culture?  What culture to teach?  How to teach culture?

The Traditional Approach Objective To help L2 learners develop the ability to use the target language in culturally appropriate ways for the specific purpose of empathizing and interacting with native speakers of the target language.

The Traditional Approach Focal point The native speaker of the target language

The Traditional Approach Components: Culture is a collection of products or facts. Culture teaching includes:  a cognitive component  an affective component  a behavioral component

The Traditional Approach Any thoughts?

The Traditional Approach Criticism:  Ignores multicultural and subcultural variations within national or linguistic boundaries  Ignores the rich diversity of world views that learners bring with them to the language classroom.

New views about culture teaching The Color Purple Theory (Robinson, 1991): Second culture acquisition is the integration of the home culture and the second culture, created when one becomes aware of one’s own cultural lens and when one recognizes the cultural lens of a different person. Neither person can escape his/her own cultural lens but each can choose to overlap lenses in order to understand the other’s perspectives better. Second culture acquisition is a process, not a collection of static products. What do you think?

New Views The Third Culture Theory (Kramsch, 1993) Learners create their own personal meaning by struggling at the boundaries between their meaning and that of native speakers. A third culture is a conceptual space that recognizes the classroom as a site of intersection of multiple worlds of discourse. What do you think?

New Views Critical Cultural Consciousness (Kumaravadivelu, 2003)  A true understanding of the cultural dynamics of an L2 classroom can emerge only through the understanding of the individual cultural identity teachers and learners bring with them.  It should be understood that there is no one culture that embodies all and only the best of human experiences and there is no one culture that embodies all and only the worst of human experience. What do you think?

The New Approach Objective To bring together different cultures, or “to expand the ways of thinking, knowing and expressing knowledge of all students through incorporating many cultural tendencies”

The New Approach Focal point: Different cultures, both that of the native speaker and that of the teacher and the learners.

The New Approach Cultural informants: The teacher and the native speaker are not privileged as the sole cultural informants. Learners are cultural informants too. A story

The New Approach Questions teachers need to ask:  How can I make learners aware of the complex connection between language use and cultural identity?  How can I sensitize myself and my learners to the cultural richness that surrounds the classroom environment?  How can I create conditions to enable and encourage my learners to participate in the negotiation and articulation of their cultural meanings and values?  How can I treat learners as cultural informants and recognize and reward their cultural knowledge and individual identities?  How can I design tasks and assignments to dispel stereotypes that create and sustain cultural misunderstandings and miscommunications?  How can I help learners to “read” cultural events and activities in ways that resonate with their experience?

The New Approach Any comments?