Teaching for cultural understanding

1
Teaching for cultural understanding

• Who is a native speaker?
• Native speaker by birth
• Native speaker by education
• The intercultural speaker
• Background
• Perspectives
• Values

2
Multilingual and multicultural societies

• Native and non-native speakers potentially belong
  to several speech communities
• Culture as a dynamic continuum of patterns of
  life, values and perspectives rather than as
  objects.

3
Traditional approaches based on the monolingual
speaker assumption

• The Frankenstein approach ( A taco from here, a
  flamenco dancer from there, a gaucho from here, a
  bullfight from there)
• The 4- F approach Folk dances, festivals, fairs,
  food
• The Tour Guide Approach (monuments, rivers and
  cities)
• The By-the-way-approach

4
Biases

• Stereotypes
• Triviality
• Political bias

5
The role of native informants

• 1.Audio and videotaped interviews with native
  speakers from different communities
• that speak the target language.
• 2. Teleconferencing
• 3. Authentic Materials
• 4. Semantic maps

6
The language acquirer as a culture learner.

• Analyze cases of cultural misunderstanding
• Why did they occur?
• What were the different assumptions/ values
• behind the misunderstanding?

7
Cultural constructs