The professional article I had chosen for
this blog post is titled Culture Teaching
in Foreign Language Teaching by Li Sun, a teacher in Changchun China. In
this article, she addresses a common problem in foreign language classrooms:
the incorporation of teaching the culture(s) of the foreign language. Because
of this, this firs well with both standards 2.1 and 2.2 of the national
standards for foreign language teaching, because of the focus on teaching
culture in the classroom. The author first addresses that the relationship
between language and culture is very dynamic, and language is an important part
of culture because without language, there would be no culture.
The first connection she makes between
foreign language learning and culture learning is that a common strategy
employed by foreign language is linguistic transfer, which refers to the effect
of one language, usually the native language, on the learning of another,
usually the target language. She then moves into a discussion of how the
hardest thing for learners is not actual language learner, but rather coming to
understand cultural differences. Furthermore, while it is inevitable that the
way of thinking and expressing influenced by the native culture will be
unconsciously transferred to the target language during intercultural
communication, defined as cultural transfer, learners should at some point develop
cultural schema for the target language, in which they are more knowledgeable
and have more of a comprehension of both the culture, and the language.
Sun then moves into the topic of theories
on culture teaching. One she introduced that was interesting to me was that
foreign language educators should include four fundamental components: language
learning, language awareness, culture awareness, and cultural experience. In
order to accomplish this, the learners must use their knowledge of their native
language to have a comparative analysis with the new language, which will
provide an integrative approach for teaching, and learning language and
culture. This stood out to me because this fits in with more of our national
standards; namely 4.1 and 4.2, which focuses on comparison. An example she
takes from her own experience is Chinese language learners, who are from the
west. In her experience, while some of these people may have had a good grasp
of the language, they were not culturally aware of the customs of China, and
often came across as very rude when communicating with others. In order to
avoid this, she argues that when conversations occur in the classroom, they
should be occurring exactly as they should in real life, which directly relates
to our discussion in class the previous week.
Overall the article, while difficult to
read at times, was an interesting, and demanding read. Sun did provide some
interesting classroom techniques, which may prove useful in the future.
Source:
Theory and Practice in Language Studies,
Vol. 3, No. 2, pp..371-375, February 2013
2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in
Finland
Mike, this is an interesting article, and I'm sure all of us can agree on the importance of cultural awareness and cultural experience in learning a second language. I believe everyone in the class has studied abroad, so we have a nice perspective on how people communicate in our target language culture. German is a little different, although I am unaware of the exact language variation, in the sense that there is less variation than there is in Spanish. People, I'm sure, have different phrasings and colloquial metaphors specific to certain regions. These, although usually just phrases, have always seemed very important to me. I mean, instead of saying, "You're not serious!" one could say, "You're pulling my leg!" The second phrase has more personal meaning, and is much more commonly used. This applies to all languages throughout the world, and like Sun said in the article, it's important to converse in the classroom as native speakers would speak in real life. The difficulty in teaching this is our lack of fluency with these phrases and idioms.
AntwortenLöschenHowever, as you said in your synopsis of the article, the hardest things for students to master isn't language itself, but the cultural differences between them. I always try to add interesting "snip-its" into the class regarding cultures of certain Spanish speaking regions, but the students don't understand the importance of other cultures. Most often, students see other countries as inferior compared to the United States. This is a horrible perspective because students fail to see the qualities that the rest of the world can teach us! Overall, I agree with Sun in the sense that cultural learning is a very important aspect of language, and without it, one cannot master the language.
I often refer to students as linguistic and cultural detectives. We can help give them skills to explore and make sense of "differences" when they see them. I think it's also important for us to focus on commonalities between languages/cultures and not just differences. One final thought which occurs to me from reading Brad's comment is it's often eye opening for students to read an article/text about Americans from a different cultural perspective to get them thinking about what others might think of us.
AntwortenLöschen