CAPES 11 : Teaching the Cultures

Start by looking here. Look through a textbook for 4e and a textbook for 2e and choose one of the Units. What attempt do the authors make to introduce pupils to aspects of one or another of the cultures of the English-speaking world? How far do they avoid stereotypes?

What do we mean by the term 'culture'? It could be that the term is so loose and ill-defined as to mean virtually nothing at all - for some discussion of the difficulties, see "The Concept of Culture...", by Martin Sökefeld of the Institute of Social Anthropology University of Hamburg, and see how many different definitions you find. For an even more skeptical view, see Charles Laughlin's notes in his tutorial on Biogenetic Structuralism.

Some idea of the difficulties that face a teacher who wants to talk about culture can be got from reading 'The Invention of Tradition', Hobsbawm & Ranger (eds), CUP, 1992. (Here you will find a commentary on the book).

Here are some documents about the role of culture in language-teaching.

From the Internet TESL journal, "Towards an Understanding of Culture in L2/FL Education", by Michael Lessard-Clouston

From the Centre for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota, "Culture Learning in Language Education: A Review of the Literature", by R. Michael Paige et al.

From the University of Ghent teacher training site, "Culture and Cultural Studies in/and/through Language Education", by Rob van Kranenburg.

An experiment in teaching culture, through the use of museums, carried out by the INRP and directed by Albain Cain of the université de Cergy, entitled Usage du patrimoine et appropriation d’une culture étrangère. Cain refers to the fact that most pupils retain their cultural stereotypes even after several years of language learning. She then outlines a programme - mainly consisting of well-conducted visits to museums - which could overcome this, but points out just how difficult it is to organize a meaningfully developed cultural course of this kind.

(If you have a question of a comment, write to me at tmason@timothyjpmason.com)