Context and Culture in Language Teaching and Learning (Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education, 6, Band 6) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1853596574 ISBN 13: 9781853596575

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The now familiar forces of globalisation and internationalisation are influencing the role and significance of language teaching and learning in contemporary classrooms. This affects the ways in which English is taught and learnt in particular but is also an inevitable factor in all language teaching and learning. The authors of the chapters in this book all share a concern to explore the ways in which the contexts in which language teaching takes place impact on the aims and the methods of language teaching. Some do so by discussing the implications for what research we do and how we do it; Kramsch, for example, explains in detail how her own research evolves from issues which arise in the classroom. In other chapters the changing nature of the teaching of English is presented from empirical research; Decke-Cornill, for example, identifies different philosophies of language teaching among different kinds of English teacher in Germany. Other authors present studies of the ways in which what learners bring to the learning process from their own contexts and languages has to be taken into consideration if we are to understand language learning; Holme shows this from close analysis of the acquisition of metaphorical language, and Wendt argues for the importance of a social constructivist theory of language learning. Our common purpose is to take a fresh look at teaching and research through the perspective of the inevitable connections between contexts, cultures and classrooms. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Byram and Peter Grundy have both worked in language teaching for many years at the University of Durham. Their interests in foreign language teaching in Britain and Europe, and in the teaching of English worldwide, complement each other and bridge the gap which often exists between ELT and other languages. They have cooperated to bring together researchers from several European countries and the USA in an endeavour to raise the awareness of the profession concerning the socio-political, cultural and psychological contexts in which language teaching and learning takes place; classrooms are not insulated from the world.

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Context and Culture in Language Teaching and Learning

By Michael Byram, Peter Grundy

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2003 Michael Byram, Peter Grundy and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85359-657-5

Contents

Mike Byram and Peter Grundy: Introduction: Context and Culture in Language Teaching and Learning, 1, 
Claire Kramsch: From Practice to Theory and Back Again, 4, 
Randal Holme: Carrying a Baby in the Back: Teaching with an Awareness of the Cultural Construction of Language, 18, 
Christiane Facke: Autobiographical Contexts of Mono-Cultural and Bi-Cultural Students and their Significance in Foreign Language Literature Courses, 32, 
Gisèle Holtzer: Learning Culture by Communicating: Native-Non-Native Speaker Telephone Interactions, 43, 
Ana Halbach: Exporting Methodologies: The Reflective Approach in Teacher Training, 51, 
Helene Decke-Cornill: 'We Would Have to Invent the Language we are Supposed to Teach': The Issue of English as Lingua Franca in Language Education in Germany, 59, 
Reinhold Wandel: Teaching India in the EFL-Classroom: A Cultural or an Intercultural Approach?, 72, 
Stephan Breidbach: European Communicative Integration: The Function of Foreign Language Teaching for the Development of a European Public Sphere, 81, 
Michael Wendt: Context, Culture and Construction: Research Implications of Theory Formation in Foreign Language Methodology, 92, 

CHAPTER 1

From Practice to Theory and Back Again

Claire Kramsch Department of German, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720, USA

A research project may begin in a 'telling moment' in the language classroom. This article describes the phases of a research project as the author moves from classroom to library, from empirical data to theoretical framework and back again. The methodology includes a comparative dimension through the collection of data from learners in three countries and demonstrates the development of insights from these three sources to gain deeper understanding of learners in the classroom from which the research questions originated. The research process thus becomes the beginning of new processes and plans for the classroom.

In the Classroom

This Wednesday morning, in my 11 o'clock third semester German class, I am discussing with my 15 undergraduate students the short story by Yüksel Pazarkaya Deutsche Kastanien that they have read the night before. The story is about a 6-year-old boy, Ender, born and raised in Germany of Turkish parents. Ender is snubbed one day in the schoolyard by his best friend Stefan, who doesn't want to play with him anymore because, he says, Ender 'is not German but an Ausländer [a foreigner].' Ender runs back home and asks his mother 'Who am I? Turkish or German?' The mother doesn't dare tell him the truth. The father answers: 'You are Turkish my son, but you were born in Germany' and tries to comfort him with the promise that he will talk to Stefan.

As a warm-up exercise, I have brainstormed students' responses to the questions: 'Why do people leave their country, what problems do they encounter in a foreign country?' The students are quick to offer all kinds of reasons and problems, for the situation is familiar to many of them. They have no difficulty expressing themselves in German: 'People look for opportunities, for a job, but they have no money, no friends, no family, they don't know the language, they can't find a job, there are many prejudices, cultural differences?'. To prepare the class for the topic of the story, I then engage them in the following exchange in German:

CK: What do you associate with the word Ausländer [foreigner]?

Ss: (silence)

S1: different?

CK: yes, people who are different, foreign (I write both words anders, fremd on the board). In America, who is an Ausländer?

Ss: (long silence)

S1: (hesitantly) In Germany Ausländer are all the people who don't look like Germans.

(long silence)

S2: Here in America ... people can look different, many have an accent, bad English ...

S3: Or no English!

S4: (half to himself) Are there any Ausländer here in America?

The students' silence and S4's question puzzle me. Why are the students suddenly so reluctant to speak? And why does S4 seem to believe that there are no foreigners in the United States? I switch topic and turn to the story proper. The class becomes lively again. I make myself a note to remember this incident and to further explore the matter.

The telling moment

Most of my research is triggered by such 'telling moments' in the classroom – my misunderstanding of a student's utterance, an unusual silence, a student's unexpected reaction, a grammatical or lexical mistake that doesn't make sense to me. Or sometimes it is just that the class that I prepared so well totally bombed and I don't know why. On the way back home, I replay the scene in my head, examining all its facets. I tell about it to my colleagues and friends: Has that ever happened to them? What do they think? What went wrong? I talk to some students I trust: what is their take on the event? Slowly I piece together a range of possible interpretations. Some tell me that Americans, unlike the Germans, don't care about who is a foreigner or a native, provided one lives in the country. People that are here illegally are a matter for the police, not for private citizens. Some tell me that it is not politically correct to talk about foreigners, or even to identify anyone as a 'foreigner', that it is almost a slur, which is why foreign students in the US are called 'international' students. Others tell me that American students probably don't understand why the boy in the story is not a German citizen, if he was born and raised in Germany. They probably think that Ender is a first-generation German, not a Turk. Yet others suggest that my questions were too vague, so the students didn't know how to answer.

Building up to a research project

So if the term Ausländer has different connotations for a German and an American, then perhaps the American students resonate quite differently to the story than I do. I decide to find out how they understand the story by having them write in class, in their own words, a 4–5 sentence summary of what the story is about. I collect the 15 summaries and, that night, I compare them to one another. To my amazement, not only are the summaries all very different, but the students' point of view comes across sometimes very visibly in the way the students have constructed their summaries. Take, for example, the following:

1. Diese Geschichte ist uber einer jugend. Er heißt Ender. Und er hat eine Probleme weil, sein Freund ihm sagte daß er kein Deutscher ist. Und alles wo Ender geht, die Menschen sagt zu ihm daß er kein Deutscher ist. Er ist ein Ausländer von Türkei.

(This story is about a youth. He is called Ender. And he has a problem because his friend told him that he is not a German. And wherever Ender goes, people say to him that he is not a German. He is a foreigner from Turkey.)

In this summary, notwithstanding the occasional case and gender errors, the combined effect of the lack of conjunctions between the sentences, the repetition of 'daß er kein Deutscher ist', and the lapidary last sentence, renders well the sense of sadness this student...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1853596574
• ISBN 13: 9781853596575
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 112
• Herausgeber: Byram Michael, Grundy Peter
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland