Culture Literature Review

After a rush to finish up the Padova-Bochum exchange and a month with family in the States, I'm back. Fran and I are making a proposal for a chapter on Culture and CALL in a Calico book on CALL (Calling on CALL, 2006). We've got a lot of work to do and the deadline is August 15th. We've set up the outline and started reading, but while she flies back from I'm doing the background reading for what's been written on Culture since the last edition was published in 2006.

Yesterday's reading was a Perspectives piece from the Modern Language Journal, 2010, on "Revisiting the Role of Culture in the Foreign Language Curriculum". Although it doesn't directly relate to CALL (the only piece really involving technology is Gilberte Furstenberg's), but it helps direct us on what FL academics are saying about culture these days. Yesterday was spending reading and taking notes. I think it would be useful for me to try and summarize my notes/thoughts here.

All the authors seem to discuss:

• we are in a time of changes, transition caused by globalization
• second language learning and culture learning cannot be separated
• culture learning is just as much about one's own culture as it is about de-centering to view other cultures, other perspectives; interconnectedness of one's own culture and other cultures
• they all prefer terms such as intercultural learning or transcultural learning to culture learning
• there should be more interdisciplinary collaboration in institutions, be this CLIL or other ways
• a greater focus on the socio-political importance of FLT and culture
• there’s a trend in education in general towards developing global/intercultural citizens, and language learning and culture clearly play an important role in this. Even in the case of Soliya, where US students are using L1, they need to develop the linguistic skills in their own L1 to effectively negotiate with NNSs of their L1.
• the importance of pragmatics in culture learning
• hypbrid identity, constructing multiple identities, moving back and forth between them and/or merging them towards a new multi-/cross-cultural identity (we may also discuss online identity)
• 
  

Introduction by Heidi Byrnes

• She states that whether or not we acknowledge it, the purposes, contexts and social activity of FL learning and teaching has changed in the past decade. We could argue that social media have played a large role in this.
• She focuses on the three main language documents: the American Standards, the CEFR and the MLA 2007 document. What they all have in common is: an interest in how to integrate culture into FLT, multi-/plurilingualism as a main goal, acknowledgement that the social contexts in which languages are used has changed significantly particularly with globalization and increased access to the Internet.

Michael Byram

• Byram's contribution is basically a sort of 'call to arms'. He points out, which I think we would agree with: "It is often in times of critical societal change that questions about purposes come to the fore, and a tension between “educational” and “functional”/“utilitarian” purposes appears in general debate about schools and society. This distinction is then applied to language learning per se" (Byram, 2007). In other words, it's what I've often stated in recent years: "The evolution of [...] computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is inherently connected to the evolution of technology, and theories on language learning pedagogy intertwined with ways in which society changes" (Guth & Petrucco, 2006).
• "way forward is to turn to education for (democratic) citizenship"
• Byram makes reference to a more recent European document by the Council of Europe, following the CEFR, entitled "Languages in Education, Languages for Education" that focuses particularly on schools, plurilingualism and CLIL. The online document states: "One major challenge for education systems is to give learners, during their school education, language and intercultural competences which will enable them to operate effectively as citizens, acquire knowledge and develop open attitudes to otherness: this vision of the teaching of languages and cultures is referred to as plurilingual and intercultural education."

Katherine Arens

• The most important part of this commentary, for my purposes, is her description and explanation of Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) concept of field, which is a smaller social organization/structure within a society. Given all of the difficulties in defining culture, this term can be helpful. As Arens sums up: "The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1993) used the term to refer to any site or region within which a group acts, communicates, and evolves its characteristic knowledge and identities (see particularly, chapter 1). That site is furnished with a tradition of institutions, group behaviors, pragmatic practices, discourses (verbal and otherwise), ideologies, and a characteristic knowledge base." This seems to fit well with our concept of the online cultures of online communities, be they nespaper forums or gaming websites.
• She adds: "Bourdieu’s (1993) field challenges us to rethink how a language curriculum can become a culture curriculum, addressing not just the language resources available to a “native speaker” (writer, reader) but also a set of interlocking cultural literacies, including the history, traditions, and the pragmatic patterns used by individuals on that field to construct and assert their identities, and to manage their negotiations with infrastructure, the community, and historical norms."
• "[...] we have to teach culture as a multisystem, based only in part on language."
• "the multiliteracies of the field of culture"

Angela Scarino

• Based on her Australian perspective in FLT and policy making, she argues for a shift away from the concept of cultural awareness to intercultural ability.
• She states: "In contrast to this cultural orientation, an intercultural orientation to teaching languages seeks the transformation of students’ identities in the act of learning. This is achieved on the part of students through a constant referencing of the language being learned with their own language(s) and culture(s). In so doing, students decenter from their linguistic and cultural world to consider their own situatedness from the perspective of another."
• Sts. who are 'interculturally able' understand: "their experiential situatedness in their own language and culture, as do all others with whom they communicate" and "they interpret people and the world through the frame of reference of their cumulative experience within their own language and culture."
• She points out that when learning and communicating people interpret and refer to both the self (intracultural) and the other (intercultural)
• At the beginning she claims she will deal with the assessment issue, but ultimately all she offers is the need to combine various forms of assessment, formative and summative.

Gilberte Furstenberg

• In addition to describing Cultura, she very much speaks to language teachers and the importance of making, like in the case of Cultura, FL classes a complete integration of FL and culture learning (even though, she concludes, it's not likely this will ever happen across the board).
• I like this quote and thought it may be an opening one for the chapter as it's what Fran and I always argue when we discuss the importance of online literacies in the framework: "[A] profound change has taken place in the last 10 years: It is the growing realization, brought on by the globalization of our world, that our students will work and interact with people of diverse cultures and will therefore need to be able to communicate effectively across boundaries that are not just linguistic."

Erin Kearney

• Cultural immersion in the FL classroom through narrative.
• Accessing, reading, interpreting, comparing and analyzing narrative, but also producing narrative (particularly from a 1st person persepective) to de-center and put oneself in the other's shoes.
• This is what she says about identity and FL learning: "Identity has in recent years figured prominently in efforts to understand the process of language learning. Work in this vein has emphasized a view of language learners as complex individuals with unique histories and multiple desires for present endeavors and future trajectories, and language learning as a process inherently enmeshed with the negotiation, exploration, and remaking of selves situated in real, imagined, and possible worlds (e.g., Coffey & Street, 2008; Kinginger, 2004, 2008; Norton, 2000; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). "
• She mentions how narrative can be used to help students develop "symbolic competence" (Kramsch, 2006) through varying types of texts (traditional and multimodal) and clear teacher guidance.
• The Danger of the Single Story video by Chimamanda is a very effective narrative to use with students, as we have.