Using Current Magazines as a Resource for Teaching Culture

Abstract

Foreign language teachers have long recognized the value of utilizing current magazines as a reading incentive since there is enormous inherent appeal in the glossy, topical nature of such material. Even beginning students are stimulated to make an effort to understand cartoons and the captions beneath pictures of their favorite celebrities. As language skills develop the task grows easier, which in turn motivates students to increase an activity that gives them both satisfaction and pleasure. Best of all, the language is authentic and currentit may not be great literature but it can provide the primeros pasos and lead to more sophisticated reading later on. Thus the linguistic rationale for keeping popular magazines within the reach of our students. However, language teaching today involves more than teaching language; it involves what Morain has termed a Commitment to the Teaching of Foreign Cultures. As she observes, The prevailing opinion holds that far from being tangentialculture is the raison d'etre for language study. Language exists primarily for the transmission of ideas-ideas are the stuff of (405). In this article I present an approach to the use of current magazines consistent with, and inspired by, this belief in the cultural rationale for language teaching. For several years my students had been provided with copies of the Spanish magazine iHola! which were examined with considerable interest both before and after class. Clearly they offer a broad panorama of Spain's current pop culture, but the Morain article inspired me to inquire whether they might shed light on what has been termed and culture as well. It was Nelson Brooks who introduced the profession to these terms when he distinguished between (1) the sociological/anthropological dimensions (deep culture), and (2) the history/fine arts aspects (formal culture). What, if anything, found in current magazines might illuminate the deep and the formal culture of Spain? A careful examitio of issues published during a two-year period yielded the felicitous discovery that many of the magazine's ads and feature stories shed light on a variety of cultural themes.