Discussion 6: Teaching Culture

          Culture in my view is everything that makes up a group of people.  Culture really is what defines a group of people.  When people asks about where a person is from, where they grew up or where there family is from, what they are really asking is about their cultural background.  They want to know where that person came from because it helps them to better understand that person in a very important way.  This is why I believe it is so important to teach L2 culture.  Teaching C2 is just as important as teaching the language.  What is language without culture?  A foreign language should be taught within a context and that context is culture!  It is easy for language instructors to forget the most important aspect of teaching language, because they become overwhelmed in the details of the language and overemphasis how important grammar and vocabulary are.  

            I don’t think that it is impossible to teach L2 culture in a classroom setting, but being restricted to a classroom does make it more difficult.  I think it is too easy for a language instructor to want to teach only “Olympian culture,” or “culture MLA,” and only show his/her students the best of that culture.  However, students are better served if they are also taught “Hearthstone culture,” or “culture BBV,” (beliefs, behavior, values) because students need to get an idea of everything that makes up a culture.  The limitations to teaching both aspects of culture is that teaching the “best” of culture is a lot easier than trying to teach culture as “everything” in human life.  The limitation is that there is so much that could be taught, so trying to focus on what should be taught is hard. The Spanish culture for example encompasses the culture of Mexico, Central American countries, South American countries, Caribbean islands, and of course Spanish culture from Spain, but people try to put all these different aspects of Spanish-speaking culture into one category.  Chapter 8 mentioned how students may get the idea that all Spanish-speaking people eat tacos, go to bullfights and take abundant naps, when this is not the case.  I have even had someone ask me in the past if I was Mexican and I do not look Mexican at all.  It would be wrong for students to believe that all Spanish people are like Mexicans especially the Americanized version of Mexican people, who eat spicy food, wear sombreros, ponchos, cowboy boots, eat tortillas and want to cross the border to get to the US. 

I think that teachers can easily teach “Big C” which focuses on product, such as the food, music, art and literature from that country (aka “Olympian culture”).  In high school I learned about “product” and was the only time I remember being tested on an aspect of culture was when I had a test that I had to match the date with an important Spanish holiday.  It takes a lot more effort for a teacher to teach perspective and practice, so students learn about “small c” which is daily life, which includes the beliefs, behavior and values of a people (aka “culture BBV”).  It is the nitty-gritty, what truly defines what a culture is and sadly it is the aspect of culture that is most often stereotyped.  Testing students on aspects of culture is crucial because that shows students that culture is just as important as language.  A teacher can list facts for students like Mexicans listen to mariachi music and Dominicans like bachata, but it is the attitudes and the reason “why” they listen to this type of music that is harder to teach.  I like how the book suggested using native informants and having students make semantic maps and do word associations.  Allowing students to explore their own word connotations and realizing that these are tied to their own cultural bias, can help students understand how the way others see their world is based on their own cultural beliefs.  I also like the idea of teaching students proverbs or idioms (un “dicho”) because these can say a lot about a culture and the belief system that the culture has.  It also shows that not all the ideas of one culture can be “translated” to another culture.

 Another important aspect of culture that is usually ignored is humor.  I wish that my Spanish classes in high school had done more on humor.  I think a teacher could easily have a “joke of the day” posted on the board each class and it would be a good way to either begin or end the class.  It would be a fun way to introduce new vocabulary or a new concept.  I realized when I went to Mexico last year how much “Mexican Spanish” I did not know.  I would be watching a cartoon show like “El Chavo” which is a very popular cartoon show in Mexico and I could not understand everything that was being said, but at least this show was meant for younger audiences so the jokes were a little easier to understand and they were acted out well.  It was even worse when I watched “El Platanito show,” a comedy show meant for adults and I couldn’t understand any of the jokes made.  It was frustrating because I could understand the individual words, but not the words as a whole.  An example in English would be the kid’s joke, Q: “How do you know when it’s raining cats and dogs?”  A: “When you step in a poodle.”  A native speaker of English would have no trouble finding this joke funny, since they understand the expression, “raining cats and dogs” and also understand that a “poodle” is a type of dog and that “poodle” sounds a lot like the word “puddle,” but a person learning English might not understand the joke/pun being made. 

It got a little better as time went on and I had been in Mexico longer.  I did “joke” with my friends that I would know when I knew Spanish well when I could understand everything on “El Platanito show.”  Mexicans jokes are pretty vulgar, so learning the use of some of the vulgar words did help, but I still have a ways to go.   Another comedy show, more family-friendly, was “La familia peluche,” which was about a “furry” family and one of the episodes I watched was about the boys in the family wanting to go watch football at a friend’s house but the mother/wife wants them to go over her in-laws house for dinner.  This is an idea that is pretty easy to understand from the point of view of American culture, so it shows that Spanish culture may not be all that different.  Learning about similarities is just as important as learning about cultural differences, though family-life is very important in the Spanish culture.  The use of authentic material such as jokes, interviews, TV shows, etc is a great way to teach about culture at the same time that you are teaching language.