Establishing a Professional Agenda for Integrating Culture into K‐12 Foreign Languages: An Editorial

Abstract

with emphases on transnational issues and cultural awareness is refocusing foreign language teachers' attention on the goals and objectives of culture in K-12 second language education. Some educators perceive second language courses as a kind of automatic or de facto global education. This perception is erroneous because: 1) culture goals and objectives are not, as Gail Robinson has indicated, integrated into either the instructional or evaluative practices in foreign-language classrooms;1 and 2) foreign language teachers are devoting far less than the one-third of the instructional time global educators are seeking in the various disciplines, spending somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 percent of their instructional time on culture according to Gertrude Moskowitz2 and Anne Nerenz.3 Whether or not individual foreign language teachers wish to become involved with global education, the status of the teaching of culture in foreign languages requires concerted professional attention, especially in view of the fact that repeated surveys of students have emphasized both speaking and culture. Because global education encompasses all disciplines in the K-12 curriculum, because it is the first school movement that offers foreign languages an opportunity to assume an integrated and meaningful role in the total school curriculum, or simply because our teaching of culture is in critical need of substantive improvement, the foreign language profession should take a lesson from Robert Leestma and establish a ten-year agenda for integrating culture into K-12 foreign language offerings.4 The result might be the globalization of some K-12 foreign language programs, but the goal