Culture: The Fifth Skill

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Kamaleddine Tabinektabine@gmu.edu

GMU Linguistics Department

Overview

• Foreign language learning• Cultural competence • What is culture learning?• Culture in teaching methodology• Pedagogical implication for foreign language classroom• The main five obstacles in teaching the fifth skill • Proposed solutions• Questions

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Foreign Language Learning

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Foreign Language Learning

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What is Culture?

• “Culture … is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them” (Kramsch, 1993: 1)

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Culture Competence

• It will be demonstrated that teaching a foreign language is not tantamount to giving a homily on syntactic structures or learning new vocabulary and expressions, but mainly incorporating a change in attitudes towards one’s own or another culture

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Culture within Caricatures I

Culture within Caricatures II

Culture within Caricatures III

مشكلتك؟ ما

Cultural Competence & Proficiency

• Motivation• Attitudes• Confidence • Self-Reflection and Self-Renewal • Proficiency Development

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• Michael Paige defines Culture learning as:” The process of acquiring the culture-specific and the culture-general knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for effective communication and interaction with individuals from other cultures. It is a dynamic developmental and ongoing process which engages the learner cognitively, behaviorally and affectively” (P.177)

What is Culture Learning?

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Paige’s Conceptual Model of Culture Learning

• Cultural-general learning•Cultural-specific learning•Knowledge•Skills•Attitude•Behavior

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Culture-General Learning

• Intercultural skills culture learning strategies coping and stress management strategies.

• Intercultural communicative Competence.• Intercultural perspective-taking skills cultural adaptability

transcultural competence

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Culture-Learning Specific

• Targets Culture Skills “little c” culture – appropriate everyday behavior

• Positive attitude toward target culture persons • Movement from knowledge to behavior and from simple

learning to high order learning

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Culture in Teaching Methodology

• The learner discovers relation between language, culture and communication.

• The learner starts analyzing and comparing his culture with the ones surrounding him.

• The learner explores his own culture• Michael Paige put this in his way: “ Meta-awareness and

cross-cultural comparison lie at the heart of such culture pedagogy. This implies providing opportunities for interaction such that ‘members of the host culture can impart their own epistemology, their own way of seeing things on the learner” (P 179)

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Pedagogical Implication for Second Language Classroom

• Teachers need to help their students to be more aware of their culture.

• Teachers need to provide students with strategy that would help learners to be effective culture learners.

• Teachers need to address all three levels of learning when design lessons: i.e. not simply build cultural knowledge but also to equip learners with cultural skills, and seek to foster positive attitudes towards learning culture.

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5 Problems Involved in Teaching the Fifth Skill

1. Overcrowded curriculum. 2. Fear of not knowing enough. 3. Dealing with students’ negative attitudes. 4. Lack of adequate training. 5. Lack of how to measure cross-cultural awareness and

change in attitudes.

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5 Suggested Solutions!!!

1. Instead of teaching language and culture in a Serial fashion, Teachers should teach culture in an integrative fashion.

2. Even if teachers’ own knowledge is quite limited, their proper role is not to impart facts, but to help students attain the skills that are necessary to make sense out of the facts they themselves discover in their study of the target culture.

3. As Teachers need to help students revise their "linguistic patterns," they also need to help them revise their "cultural patterns .

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5 Suggested Solutions!!! (Cont.)

4 – Teachers need to seek for training and workshops related to culture learning

5- Teachers need to be familiarized with Hanvey’s (1979) concepts on Measuring Cross-Cultural Awareness

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DLI GLOSS Samples on Culture

• http://gloss.dliflc.edu/products/gloss/ad_cul201/default.html

• http://gloss.dliflc.edu/products/gloss/ad_cul021/default.html

• http://gloss.dliflc.edu/products/gloss/ad_cul216/default.html

In a Nutshell!!• “Culture must be fully incorporated as a vital component of

language learning. Second language teachers should identify key cultural items in every aspect of the language that they teach. Students can be successful in speaking a second language only if cultural issues are an inherent part of the curriculum” (cal.org)

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References• Lange, D. L. & Paige, R. M. (Eds.) (2003). Culture as the core: Perspectives in

second language education. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.• www.carla.org• www.cal.org• http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Plastina-CultureInLiterature/

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謝謝

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