The Challenges of Addressing Culture in Modern Language Education

In the early weeks of a first semester French class I was teaching, I asked students about where they lived, following a short lesson on the question form 'D'où viens-tu?' (Where are you from?) and the basic vocabulary necessary for responding. The problem arose that a student wanted to say that she was from a town in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. I hesitated, yet went to the chalkboard, wrote the word 'banlieue' (suburb), then modeled how the student could make a full sentence using the term, and waited for her to repeat. I then took care to note to the class, in English, that the word carried different connotations in French, that the 'banlieue' was not as coveted a place to live as in the US (as some people sometimes refer to 'suburban bliss' for example). In France, I explained, moderate-income housing in the form of tall apartment buildings was located on the outskirts of the main cities and for decades has been a place where immigrant families and families in financial difficulty have lived in higher concentrations than in other places, like inside cities (although ethnic neighborhoods obviously exist in Paris and elsewhere in France). But as I spoke I realized the essentialization of culture that was occurring as I tried to succinctly deal with a very complex word and meaning. I knew, first of all, that discussions of social housing in French society differ from those in the US, with important conceptions of assimilation and integration being talked about in very different ways in the two societies. I also knew that living in a 'cité' (a grouping of tenement buildings in the French suburbs and another lexical item that is enormously complex) and being from the 'banlieue' evoke images of a very particular nature for speakers of French and that even within the category of 'French speakers,' understandings of this word are rooted in various social realities; yet, relating the complexity of the interrelated linguistic and social situation in this introductory-level course seemed at odds with the purpose of the class – to get the basics of the French language.

My student's question made me think of the gross generalities that are sometimes made in presenting the vocabulary for talking about where one lives, ostensibly for the sake of getting students to master linguistic elements themselves, outside of their social and cultural context, before delving into the complex meanings around such words as 'banlieue'. This moment signaled to me more generally as well the complicated task of communicating meaning to my students. It led me to consider what other instructors might have done in the same situation, and it seems that in at least some cases, this discussion would have been completely glossed over or the complexity of the term entirely ignored, with a translation being supplied and no further discussion ensuing. On the other hand, perhaps instructors had effective strategies for addressing the social and cultural weight of language even in the introductory-level classroom. What was also striking to me shortly after this classroom experience was that in another class that I was teaching, a fifth semester, intermediate French level, life in the 'banlieue' was taken up in much more detail, with three and a half hours of class time over several days devoted to examining the historical, artistic, social and linguistic aspects of life for 'banlieusards' (people who live in the 'banlieue'). In this content-based course, the learners' language skills were assumed to be stable enough to allow for much more substantive discussion of social and cultural reality and were conducted entirely in French. Ultimately, this classroom moment and many others that occurred in the course of my own teaching practice, led me to wonder about the place of culture in language learning and how, in a modern language (ML) classroom especially, culture is taught and learned. (Kearney, 2008: 1–3).

These episodes from my own teaching inspired the classroom ethnography reported in this book. Upon learning of another university-level French classroom, from which students apparently emerged not only with improved linguistic abilities but also deep cultural knowledge and competence, I became interested in studying Emilie – a reportedly outstanding ML teacher – her students, and the impact her pedagogical approach had on their learning. The challenge I faced in the classroom and the one Emilie faced in teaching culture is indeed the challenge faced by many ML educators these days – how to engage students in more deeply meaningful learning in the language classroom, how to connect them with culture and hopefully, in the process, how to spur change in their worldviews.

The ML classroom, for me, for Emilie and for many others increasingly, is a site where students not only learn to speak, read, listen or write a new language but where they also can learn to understand, to feel and to be in new ways and to potentially transform themselves and the world around them through language study. Transformative ML education is, I will argue, intimately tied to a view of language learning as an engagement in meaning-making activity or what we might refer to as semiotic practice. Reconceptualization along these lines is already occurring in some ML classrooms but also in theorizing of what language education is as an individual and group activity. Research, too, increasingly attempts to document and analyze classroom interactions, learners' subjective and personal experiences with language learning, and the broader policy and political environment in which language education occurs, all in an effort to foreground the meaning and meaningfulness of language learning as an activity. All of this work underscores the argument that rethinking the meaning of ML education and meaning-making in ML education is the major issue language teachers, theorists and researchers grapple with today.

What we need above all in order to continue moving these efforts forward is to more clearly connect meaning-based theories language with actual classroom environments and practices so that a range of contexts and experiences with meaning-making in ML classrooms becomes visible. Research that produces nuanced descriptions of the overarching conditions and the specific teaching and learning interactions that foster deep cultural learning will form the basis for generating a more robust set of curricular and pedagogical options when it comes to teaching culture in ML education.

In this book, cultural learning – or better intercultural learning – and meaning-making practices in language education are taken to be closely linked. The complicated enterprise of making meaning in ML classrooms is assumed to involve linguistic and other semiotic...