Different research dedicated to
defining the nature importance
and place of culture in foreign
language study
School
curricula
delineate quite strictly language classes
taught in the foreign language from
literature or culture classes that are
teught in the L2 or in the students native
language
Literature pedagogy
big c
analysis, interpretation and
translate of texts of other
languages
Language pedagogy
small c
communicative competence
and acquisition of
conversational skills
Language teachers
Language learners
Debates
What Culture should be taught:
specific lifestyle of
specific speakers?
General humanistic fund of
wisdom as transmitted
through literature and arts?
Is the goal to raise
students'
awareness:
about Language in general?
to give them skills necessary to
communicate with L2 speakers with global
economy?
to enable them to travel abroad
as tourists or to seek
employment?
to become literary
scholars and
academics?
Issues of national and
social identity in a world
of rapidly changing; gap
between generations
what is culture?
Dialogism
know our culture
throught the eyes of
the other culture
It is a differential relation. To perceive the
world through the metaphors, the idioms and
the grammatical patterns used by the Other.
through dialogue., composed of utterances and
responses, links not only two interlocutors in
each other’s presence, but readers to distant
writers, and present texts to past texts.
What’s in a language?
Language as
symbolic system
represents
social reality by
referring to the outside
world
express
social reality by indexing
social and cultural
identities
is a
metaphor for
reality as it stands for, or
is iconic of, a world of
beliefs and practices that
we call ‘culture’
Teaching culture: Modernist
perspectives
Big C
As a humanistic concept,
culture is the product of a
canonical print literacy
acquired in school; it is
synonymous with a general
knowledge of literature and
the arts.
Little c
It includes the native
speakers’ ways of behaving,
eating, talking, dwelling, their
customs, their beliefs and
values.
Teaching culture:
Postmodernist
perspectives
the relationality of self and other
across multiple timescales in a
decentered perspective, where the
meaning of events emerges in a
non-linear way in interactions with
others, and social reality is
constructed minuteby- minute in the
ongoing discourse.
In a postmodernist perspective,
culture has become a discourse,
that is, a social semiotic
construction.
Intercultural competence
In foreign language study, the concept
of intercultural competence emerged
in Europe alongside the concept of
communicative competence, with a
social and political orientation
knowledges
knowledge of self and Claire
Kramsch/Culture in foreign
language teaching 70 other; of
interaction; individual and
societal
skills to discover
and/or interact
skills to
interpret and
relate
(critical cultural
awareness, political
education
attitudes:
relativising self,
valuing others
Intercultural communication
online has been focused
instead on participation in
on-line communities
conclusion
The teaching of culture will always experience a tension
between, on the one hand, the need to identify, explain,
classify and categorize people and events according to
modern objective criteria and, on the other hand, the desire
to take into account the post-modern subjectivities and
historicities of living speakers and writers who occupy
changing subject positions in a decentered, globalized world.