Culture and CALL

This week we focused on the topic of teaching culture with CALL tools. We read Guth & Helm's (2012) chapter, which gave a nice framework for explaining culture and how hard to pin down this concept is. In our class discussions we also talked about  the essentialist and non-essentialist approaches to culture.

I am quite critical of the way in which culture is sometimes taught and thought of in connection with language learning. Dan mentions in his blog post about some of the problems that arise when teachers think they should be teaching culture along with language. My experience is similar to Dan's, as my Chinese language learning experiences often involved learning meaningless dialogues about some aspect of Chinese culture. It seems that teachers feel they can easily teach some traditional practice of their culture as a way to embed culture within language learning. However, I think these approaches often do little to address students' pressing communicative language needs. If I am learning Chinese, for example, how beneficial will learning about Chinese tea serving customs really help me? In general, I think for some teachers sharing something about their own culture is rather self-serving.

Despite of my critical view on teaching culture, I do believe there is a place for some aspects of culture and language learning and the connection to CALL. Kerry Pusey has been looking into teaching different speech acts through the use of sitcom segments via youtube. In discussing aspects of American culture as they relate to the completion or failure of different speech acts, I feel the connection between culture and language is very apparent. To me, this is perhaps one of the most applicable ways to use CALL to teach culture, especially if the speech acts have been identified as ones the learners will need to know to function in the target culture.