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IATEFL Poland A Journal for Teachers of English ISSN 1642-1027 Vol. 6, Issue 2 (May 2006) |
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IATEFL Poland A Journal for Teachers of English ISSN 1642-1027 Vol. 6, Issue 2 (May 2006) |
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TEACHING CULTURE!
Abstract The
Teaching Culture! project develops inter-cultural awareness in adult educators
through blended-learning teacher training courses. The main question was
whether inter-cultural awareness could develop through a course which was
largely online. We experimented in monitoring the progress of inter-cultural
awareness, a set of skills which are notoriously difficult to define. We used
learning diaries and portfolios over two rounds of the pilot course, the first
round with language teachers and the second for teachers in all subject areas.
The results of our study suggest that our approach succeeds in raising
inter-cultural awareness. Introduction ‘To know another‘s language and not his culture is a very
good way to make a fluent fool of one’s self.’ (Brembeck, 1997) In an
increasingly mobile and multi-cultural Europe you don’t even have to travel to
come across other cultures. School teachers are increasingly well prepared for
inter-cultural encounters but adult education teachers do not have access to so
many training opportunities. The Teaching Culture! project, supported by the
Grundtvig strand of the European Union’s Socrates programme, sought to remedy
this by experimenting with developing a blended learning teacher training
course to enable adult education teachers to develop their inter-cultural
awareness. One of the greatest uncertainties was whether inter-cultural
awareness could be nurtured through a course which was largely online. The
project also experimented with how to monitor the development of cultural
awareness. Inter-cultural
issues which may arise in the adult education classroom include: 1.
Dealing with different attitudes to learning; 2.
Dealing with different attitudes to teaching; eg. the
teacher as ‘sage on the stage’ or ‘guide on the side’. 3.
Building cultural perspectives into teaching
materials and activities. 4.
Overcoming stereotypes and prejudice in learners,
their families and other teachers. 5.
Communicating across cultures. These
issues arise to a greater or lesser extent across the whole of adult education.
The obvious starting point is language teachers, who were targeted in the first
round of the pilot course. However the second round of the pilot course was
opened to teachers of all subjects so that the general applicability of the
course could be tested. In both pilots there were strict limits on the numbers
from each country to ensure a mixture of cultural backgrounds. The group size
was 11 in both pilots. The project partners came from
Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, Austria, Germany, Spain, Ireland and the UK and
included professionals from universities, research institutes, teacher training
institutions, adult education institutions and cultural associations. There
was, therefore, a broad inter-cultural representation from various relevant
professions. In addition to technical and administrative support, required
roles included personal tutors for each participant, unit tutors to prepare and
monitor the use of materials for both the online and face to face units, and a
course director to ensure curriculum cohesion. Often
inter-cultural training takes place in mono-cultural groups, so one of the aims
with this project was to make the experience inter-cultural right from the
start. One common problem for adults taking part in training events is lack of
time. Therefore, taking a culturally mixed group of adults for an intensive
face-to-face course over several weeks was simply not feasible especially since
this would involve long periods in another country for most, if not all, of the
participants. The solution proposed was therefore a blended learning course in
three modules. The first module is an extended period of collaborative online
study followed by the second module, an intensive week of face-to-face
activities, with the whole rounded off by a
third module, a second online period in which participants devise and try out
each other’s ideas in the classroom. See the course structure in Table 1 below.
Table 1: The three module structure. The
project faced two major challenges: 1.
Is it possible to develop inter-cultural awareness
online? 2.
Is it possible to chart the development of
inter-cultural awareness online? Module One 1.
Developing inter-cultural awareness online There are
two approaches to inter-cultural training, culture specific and culture
general. Culture specific refers to the do’s and don’ts guidelines one often
gets just prior to a business trip, foreign work placement, or internship to a
specific country. This gives information without stressing understanding.
Culture general refers to the acquisition of an understanding of what culture
means and how it can lead to different behaviours and perceptions. Whilst not
of immediate use to a forthcoming visit to a specific culture, it may help to
make one more tolerant of ambiguity and differences, which in the long run may
be more useful. It was this latter approach which we tried to promote in the
Teaching Culture course. The first
module provides an introduction to the major features of inter-cultural
considerations by reference to both the basic theory of inter-cultural
communication and the participants’ own personal experiences. The second module
was the face to face component designed to provide inter-cultural experiences
by bringing the multi-cultural group together in an unfamiliar location where
they would get to know each other. They would also take part in inter-cultural
activities which test their ability to operate in a different culture. The
third and final module is where participants get the opportunity to combine
theory and personal experience in planning activities for their own classroom
as well as trying out their colleagues’ ideas to judge how well the ideas travel
across cultural boundaries and how to adapt them for use in different cultural
contexts. In
adopting the culture-general approach, it is usual to lead participants to
recognise their own cultural background before going on to examine features of
other cultures and their own reactions to these. However, this was not explicit
enough for the participants of the first pilot round, and therefore in the
second round the project group devised a story metaphor to chart this learning
journey. The story was based around the idea of the group coming together in
the virtual campus. The resulting story and corresponding modules are shown in
Table 2 below.
Table 2: The story metaphor
across the three modules The story metaphor was most strongly developed in the
units of Module 1 as shown below in Table 3.
Table 3: Units in Module 1
– Intercultural campus Attempts
were made to vary the activities as much as possible during the online sections
and to avoid the tendency to make online courses heavily text-based. The
exercises in Module 1 therefore included reports on the participants’ own
culture, exploration of metaphors, choosing representative pictures, collecting
evidence from media, and individual interviews and role plays. This achieved
two goals, the first being to make the course accessible to those whose skills
in English are not so high and the second being to make the course as
experiential as possible since this is deemed most effective in inter-cultural
training. 2.
Monitoring the development of inter-cultural awareness online Inter-cultural
awareness is manifest in the reactions of an individual when faced with an
inter-cultural situation. Those reactions are based mainly on an individual’s
innermost beliefs and values and can be tempered to some extent by training and
awareness-raising. These deeply personal attributes are largely hidden from
view and difficult to make explicit. There are also important ethical questions
relating to the extent to which we can aim to tamper with and change these
beliefs as described by Byram (2000). Another indication of the sensitivity of
the issue is that the promoters of the Common European Framework of Reference
for languages have considered and failed to come up with indicators of
inter-cultural skills. Learning
diary and portfolio The
project team therefore concluded that the most effective approach to charting
inter-cultural awareness development was through self-reporting and
self-assessment. The approach adopted was to encourage reflective learning through
the compilation of (1) a learning diary, in which participants recorded their
progress, feelings, triumphs and difficulties; and (2) a portfolio in which
participants could collect their work, notes and other material of interest.
These two items were shared periodically with the personal tutor which each
participant was allocated. This was usually the project partner in the country
where the participant was based. In most cases this ensured the participant had
face to face meetings throughout the duration of the course but in a couple of
cases the distances involved meant that these tutorial sessions were also
online or at least by telephone. Table 4 below shows where the tutors fit in to
the overall course structure.
Table 4: Support structure Collaborative
activities Another
important part of the strategy was to create opportunities for reflection by
promoting collaborative activities across cultures as the main method of
content delivery. Many of the activities across the whole course required
working in small groups with participants from different cultures. Participants
were also required to use their immediate circle of family, friends and
colleagues as cultural informants for finding out about their own cultural
background. During the face to face residential period one of the tasks is for
participants to form small inter-cultural working groups for the final teaching
activity in which group members try out and evaluate each other’s tasks as well
as their own, once back in their own home environment. Module 2 The residential
The
residential in the first pilot took place in Lithuania, a country unknown by
most of our participants except our one Lithuanian participant, and therefore a
really inter-cultural experience for all. An important element of the
residential was an exercise designed to reveal the participants’ values with
respect to their teaching. This was the subject of a useful plenary on the last
day about the implications of participants’ bringing different sets of values
to their classrooms. In addition to purely pedagogical and team building
exercises, various inter-cultural experiences were timetabled in. One was a
tutorial in the Lithuanian language and another was a city-wide treasure hunt
through Vilnius which required our participants to solicit information from
passers-by thereby initiating contact with local people. In
Lithuania, our hosts organised dancing classes so that our participants could
learn one or two traditional Lithuanian dances. The dances are a much more
important part of Lithuanian culture than in many other European cultures
partly because they were suppressed or discouraged during the Soviet era. The
school children assigned to the task did a very good job of coaching our
participants. The biggest challenge was for our participants to perform, in
front of the mainly local Lithuanian audience, the two dances they had learned
at a folk dance evening organised especially for our benefit. The performance
was followed by a buffet reception which in fact turned out to be more of a
challenge for the project partners than the participants who had had the
benefit of getting to know the Lithuanians all afternoon. This demonstrated the
value of personal contact quite forcibly and the lesson was not lost on the
project partners. A basic theme running throughout the project is ‘from virtual
to real´ but sometimes it was the other way round as when the participants
created an online travelogue of the residential period which can be seen at http://www.teaching-culture.de/en/events/litauen/travelogue/travelogue_start.htm.
Module 3 The lesson
exchange For some
participants this was the most anticipated part of the course. During the
residential week they came together in small inter-cultural groups of three to
four persons to create inter-cultural lessons around a common theme. The themes
which emerged during the residential were ·
non-verbal communication ·
the use of pictures ·
developing empathy or tolerance. Groups formed easily during the residential prior to
creating, trialling and exchanging teaching ideas. The biggest problem in this
final module was the staggered summer holiday across Europe which made regular
online communication difficult since the project partners had naturally
insisted on inter-cultural working groups. It also affected the participants’
ability to trial the lesson plans with exam or induction periods intervening. Challenges The
project organizers were able to learn a great deal from the first round, and
lessons learned were implemented in the second pilot which at the time of
writing is still in session. The second pilot invited participants from any
subject area and this attracted a very wide range of participants including art
and dance teachers, online learning consultants, multimedia teachers and
economics lecturers, which will create a challenge in forming groups for the
exchange of teaching ideas in Module 3. Two of the
problems encountered have already been mentioned namely staggered holidays and
the need for a more explicit thread running through the course. These have both
been addressed; the first by re-scheduling the course and the second by the
development of the story metaphor. Another problem was that a common language
had to be chosen for the course. One of the main aims was to foster
communication between the participants, thus facility in English was a
requirement, and it then became a question of what level was sufficient. We
decided on B1[1]
according to the Common European Framework of Reference. Even so there
is a delicate balance to be struck between the amount of background theory to
be considered as a basic minimum and over-burdening participants with language
which is above their level. In some
cases this problem can be overcome by ensuring that all rubrics, guidance, and
instructions generated by the project developers are at an appropriate level.
For example, an article was specially written for one of the units and this was
explicitly simplified for the second pilot. This was done using online tools
such as The Compleat Lexical Tutor (http://www.lextutor.ca/),
which analyzes texts to show which word lists the vocabulary used belongs to.
It was therefore possible to substitute uncommon words with more common words
in many but not all cases. The readability analysis contained within the text
processing program was also used to reduce average sentence length and number
of passive sentences. The other
major problem unsurprisingly was misunderstandings. To a certain extent, an
inter-cultural communication course thrives on misunderstandings in that they
provide a rich fund of critical incidents which serve both to illustrate
problems and which can be used as exercises for deepening understanding later
on. The potential for misunderstanding was all the greater because we were
working mostly online. The main example from the first round occurred when we
invited participants to post pictures representing their culture. When one
of the participants posted a picture of the Virgin Mary, some of the other
participants assumed that this meant that she was fervently religious. However,
such assumptions were not voiced openly through the course website. Rather they
were voiced privately between participants or to tutors by email. It was not
until the residential week when a session on the use of pictures was scheduled
that an explanation of the picture was finally forthcoming. The participant had
posted the picture to represent the differences she had experienced moving from
a Protestant part of Germany to a Catholic region where religious icons are
much more common. This incident illustrates two points. First was the need to
define tasks carefully when working online. The problem arose when the
participant did not realise she was meant to comment on her choices after
allowing an initial period for reaction by the rest of the group. The second
point is that while the course was carefully planned, there was also a need and
a willingness to amend the programme when the necessity arose. Benefits There were
many benefits to running two pilot rounds, one of these being that we could use
the participants from the first round as consultants to the round 2
participants when they come to planning their inter-cultural classroom
activities. By sharing their newly gained expertise and further experience
gained since the end of the course it is hoped that this will be an important
additional benefit of the course. Results What sort
of reflections does the learning diary give rise to? The following extracts are
quoted as evidence that the online section of the course does give rise to real
increases in inter-cultural awareness. They are taken from the pilot 2
participants, who have yet to meet face to face at the time of writing. 1. “It was my first chat and I liked it. Talking,
communicating, replying, listening, disclosing - that way we may get to know
our own stereotypes as well as the more hidden ones in the media. Knowing my
dialogue partners leads to the wish to understand them.” Birgit 2. “I've enjoyed this lively expression and exchange of
messages and reflections, and I find the asynchronous online format useful for
such discussions. I like the pause to stimulate my own thinking before I write
back to you, and sometimes I may have an inner dialogue for a while before I
answer, and maybe even not, when I'm too busy elsewhere.” Susanne 3.
“I really enjoyed this unit because of its really
practical and everyday-life implications. Unit 5 was a very important step for
my intercultural understanding.” Magdalena 4.
“I would like to tell you that I was really enjoyed
about the last unit and the chat was a very new and interesting experience for
me. All your contributions made me think a lot about the influence of mass
media and my own stereotypical views and their origins.” Brigitte There is
greater interaction in the second round, and this has made for a richer
experience for all. It is difficult to know whether this is due to the
individuals involved or whether it can be attributed to the improved
presentation and structure of the course. The quotes below from current
participants reflect this: 1.
“And until now all my expectations have [been]
fulfilled and every day I am looking forward to the news from all the other
participants.” Brigitte 2.
“I like working in multicultural settings and thought
this course would be interesting [and so] it proves to be.” Birgit It must be
admitted that using this devolved system of recording inter-cultural awareness
development means that the results are very personal, known sometimes only to
the participant’s personal tutor apart from the participant. Indicators of
progress emerge by proxy through evaluations undertaken at key points of the
course such as half way through Module 1, at the end of Module 2, and at the
end of Module 3. Since the inception of the project, the project team has been
working on producing a set of can-do statements regarding cultural awareness
for participants to assess themselves against. We are making progress on such a
list but have yet to test it out on any of the pilot groups. Conclusion The hope
is that the course developed by the project can be adapted and used by others
once the project is over. The blend of online and face-to-face contributes to
its success, with online Module 1 providing a solid basis from which to work in
the face-to-face Module 2. The residential is an important transformative event
which builds on the awareness set in train during the online period and helps
to build the trust necessary for the participants to work more closely together
in developing and sharing teaching ideas. The two pilot rounds have been
invaluable in fine-tuning the course. As we enter the read-write era of the
Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, more interactivity could be built into the
online section of the course thereby making this part even more inter-cultural. Notes 1.
Level B is an independent user; B1 is defined as ’Threshold’. Find out more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_ 2.
Readers interested in finding out more about the project are invited to request
a video DVD about the first round from the author or see a reduced-quality version on the project website (http://www.teaching-culture.de/en/events/ References Brembeck, W. (1997) The
development and teaching of a college course in intercultural communication. Readings
in Intercultural Communication. Pittsburgh: SIETAR Publications, University
of Pittsburgh. Byram, M. (2000)
Assessing inter-cultural competence in language teaching. Sprogforum, 6
(18), 8-1. Retrieved May 1, 2006 from: http://inet.dpb.dpu.dk/infodok/sprogforum/Espr18/byram.html.
Cobb,
T. The Compleat Lexical Tutor. [Web site]. Retrieved May 1, 2006 from: http://www.lextutor.ca/. Council of Europe (2001) Common European Framework of Reference for
Languages. Retrieved May 1, 2006 from: http://www.coe.int/T/E/Cultural_Co-operation/education/ Teaching Culture. [Web site]. Retrieved May 1, 2006
from: http://www.teaching-culture.de. Editor’s
notes: This presentation was made as a regular session at
theWebheads in Action Online Convergence on November 19, 2005.
NEGOTIATING FOR MEANING ACROSS BORDERS WITH CMC
and Susana
Trabaldo Abstract
In our Tandem Language Learning
(TLL) project experience using Computer Mediated Communication, fifty students
of Spanish at a university in the USA exchanged e-mail and participated in
synchronous conversations using Instant Messaging with fifty students of
English at a university in Argentina.
An analysis of the discourse produced with these two methods of CMC
showed that a variety of functions were used by the students to negotiate for
meaning. The investigators will refer
to the importance of TLL and negotiating for meaning in Second Language
Acquisition as well as the students´ opinions after the experience. We will also include examples of the
learners’ cultural exchange, post study observations, and recommend
possibilities for future investigation. Introduction
As language educators we all know that learning a language
is more than just memorizing a vocabulary list and grammar rules. Language learners need communicative
competence which has as a feature the ability to use the target language to communicate
in a spontaneous situation. Computer
technology has created the opportunity to include computer mediated
communication (CMC) in our language teaching.
Recently, second language (L2) researchers have found that using e-mail
and chat rooms is an effective use of technology for a communicative approach
to teaching languages (Blake 2000, Lee 2004, Patterson 2001, Toyoda & Harrison
2002, Tudini 2003, Schwienhorst 1997 and 1998, Sotillo 2000, Smith 2003). The
increased use of and familiarity with CMC have provided us with the prospect of
incorporating computer mediated Tandem Language Learning (TLL) into the
classroom. Tandem
Language Learning
TLL
involves the interaction of two individuals with different native languages
that are learning each other’s language.
They meet and talk, speaking one language for half the time and the
other language the other half. In this
way both participants benefit from the exchange. Schwienhorst
(1998) and Little et al (1999) refer to the three principles of tandem learning
presented in the Tandem Guide by Little & Brammerts (1996), which have been
respected in this project: ·
Bilingualism: Learners were instructed to use
both target languages equally throughout the project. ·
Reciprocity: Because the learners alternated
languages in both forms of CMC, both groups benefited from the
interaction. ·
Autonomy: Rather than switch to their native language students often
negotiated for meaning in the target language when they did not understand
something. They took the initiative for their own learning and took advantage
of the opportunity to learn both language and culture from a native speaker
without the guidance of a teacher. In TLL the learners assume the responsibility for improving their own
language skills, facilitating clear communication with native speakers of their
target language by asking questions and negotiating for meaning, and helping
their tandem partners to understand their native language. The learners have an opportunity to not only
practice the target language but also to be exposed to a different culture,
first-hand from a native speaker. Each
learner takes on the role of teacher or as Donaldson and Kötter explain it,
"the partners become in effect 'resident experts' of their own linguistic
and cultural community and support the learning process of the other"
(1999: 537). Appel (1999), Lee (2004), and Schwienhorst (1998b) liken the concept of
learner autonomy to the social-interactive nature of language presented by the
psychologist Vygotsky. As Lee puts it,
language is a tool that the individual uses to socialize with others and
through this socialization, learners can help each other in performing a shared
task. Vygotsky (1978) states that this
social interaction promotes learning through the “zone of proximal development”
which he explains as the difference in what an individual can achieve solving
problems by himself and what he can achieve with the help of an adult or more
capable peers. Thus, through social
interaction during the course of this investigation, using CMC, the tandem
partners enter this ‘zone of proximal development’ as they interact and
negotiate meaning, helping each other comprehend each other’s language and
learn about their culture under one another’s guidance. We provided our students with the opportunity to participate in this TLL
project hoping that as they interacted with native speakers of the target
language they would improve their language skills, increase their vocabulary in
the target language (TL), learn more about the culture found in their tandem
partner's country, and of course increase their language acquisition. Negotiation for meaning
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has shown
that interaction and especially negotiation for meaning are essential elements
of language acquisition (Gass and Varonis 1994, Gass 1997, Long 1985, Pica
1994, Swain 1998). Pica
(1994: 494) defines negotiation as “the modification and restructuring of
interaction that occurs when learners and their interlocutors anticipate,
perceive, or experience difficulties in message comprehensibility.” As the learners negotiate for meaning they
modify their speech linguistically to produce comprehensible TL. They
accomplish this task by repeating a message, adjusting its syntax, changing the
vocabulary, or modifying its form and meaning. Long
and Robinson (1998) classified the process of negotiation for meaning under the
Interaction Hypothesis. This hypothesis states that the conditions for second
language acquisition are improved when learners negotiate meaning with other
speakers. These negotiations tend to
increase input comprehensibility through language modifications such as
simplifications, confirmation or clarification requests, elaborations, and
recasts. Thus, activities that promote
negotiation for meaning create a quality environment for SLA to occur. Design
and methodology of study
The
subjects of this study included 50 learners of Spanish from Rice University in
Houston, Texas and 50 learners of English from Universidad Tecnológica Nacional
(UTN) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The
two groups of 50 learners at the two universities were randomly paired as
tandem partners. Throughout one
semester, from September to December, the pairs of students communicated with
each other by sending e-mails and participating in Instant Message (IM) online
chats. In addition, some Rice students
created video letters to be viewed by the Buenos Aires students and Buenos
Aires students posted digital photographs on-line for Rice students to
see. In
September and October the learners exchanged two e-mails every week: one e-mail
in Spanish and one e-mail in English.
There were, however, no controls or limits on the topics or the amount
of language they should write in each e-mail.
Because of this there was no consistency in the length of e-mails that
were sent. Throughout the month of
November, the pairs of learners participated in four IM chats online using the
MSN Instant Messaging system. They were
told to participate in each chat for a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes, twice in
Spanish and twice in English. At the
end of the investigation, the learners were given a questionnaire to provide
the investigators with feedback and the learners’ opinion of the study and its
benefits if any. Data
and Discourse Functions
Data
were collected in the form of e-mails and saved IM chats. Each written
utterance produced by the 50 pairs of learners was analyzed and classified
according to its function within the discourse. The categories used to classify the different functions of each
utterance in both the asynchronous e-mails and synchronous computer discussions
are based on those used by Patterson (2001) in her research on Computer
Assisted Class Discussions (CACD). A list of the functions used in the discourse analysis which are
considered to reflect negotiation for meaning can be found in the table in Appendix
I . E-mails
After completing the discourse
analysis of all e-mails, we totaled the number of times each pair used the
specific discourse functions that were previously noted to be associated with
negotiation for meaning. These data are
located in the following table (Table 1).
Table
1: Total Discourse Functions associated with negotiation used in all e-mail Due to the
nature of this TLL project it was not possible to separate the two languages in
the e-mail portion. The students often
wrote a question in an e-mail written in one language and received a response
in the next e-mail in the other language, as can be seen in the examples
below. Therefore, the data for e-mails
are for both languages combined and there is no distinction between the
negotiations found in native or foreign languages. The
following examples are excerpts from e-mail exchanges. Negotiation functions in the examples are
written in bold letters and labeled.
The Spanish discourse is followed by an English translation. This first example is taken from e-mails written in English. Student D from Argentina is unsure about some of her phrases in | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
