Organizing Principles and Performance Objectives for Courses in Foreign Culture

Abstract

The bulk of recent literature on teaching foreign culture has dealt with the inclusion of a cultural component in foreign language courses, rather than with the design and conduct of that are devoted entirely to a study of the culture. The prevailing thought that the former endeavor should receive more of our attention than the latter has been stated succinctly by H. Ned Seelye: Culture should be taught when we have students to teach. In foreign language classes, for example, the national attrition rate of 90 percent at the end of the second year of language study indicates that culture must be taught during the first two years of foreign language study. Only a fraction of our efforts to teach cultural understanding should be directed to upper-level courses (4). While I enthusiastically support the teaching of culture in language and believe that much has been accomplished of late on this front, I also feel that comparable improvements in advanced in culture have not taken place. We need to go far beyond the generally accepted tenet that materials and class discussion in culture be mainly in the target language. We must determine to the best of our ability precisely what and how to teach the few students who enroll in the upper-level courses, keeping in mind that it is they who are most likely to put their knowledge of foreign language and culture to significant use in job and leisure situations. Of particular concern is the articulation or meshing of today's culturally oriented language with the third or fourth-year culture courses. The present study seeks to provide some of the answers, and at the same time to stimulate greater interest and activity in improving the teaching of culture to advanced students. In discussing the content of a course in foreign culture we must realize first that our subject matter is enormous, practically limitless. What then needs to be included and how should it be organized in order for students to get a firm grasp on the particular culture? Fortunately, a good deal of work has already been done on this problem, and Genelle Morain, in an up-to-date review, has described the solutions that have evolved (404-05). The most significant development for our purposes here has been the formulation of course goals, the indispensable first step in deciding what the makeup of a culture course ought to be. The best approach is to set an all-encompassing supergoal and follow it with several limited, well delineated goals or objectives. My supergoal, which is based on one put forth by Seelye (49), takes the form of a brief, challenging statement: