Before You Watch

Reflect on Your Experience

1. How would you define culture?

2. What aspects of culture are you most comfortable teaching? How do you typically incorporate culture into your lessons?

3. What challenges have you faced when exploring culture in the foreign language classroom?

4. Do you typically use English or the target language to explore cultural topics, information, and insights? Does it vary depending on the discussion? If so, how do you decide which language to use to explore cultural topics?

5. How does your textbook treat cultural topics? If you do not use a textbook, how do you determine which cultural topics to integrate into your lessons and how you will integrate them?

6. How do you address any stereotypes that students may have about the target culture?

Examine the Research

Articles

1. What do you think about Galloway's advice to treat culture as a "theory of relativity" (see p. 9)? How does it compare to your experience teaching cultural topics?

2. How might you use the observation/interpretation model in your classroom?

3. Using Bennett's model (Galloway, p. 10), at what stages would you place yourself in terms of your intercultural sensitivity? Where would you place your students?

4. Galloway speaks of maps as being "inherently biased" in that they not only attempt to represent the world, but also serve to advance a specific "world view" (p. 6). How might you use the classroom as a way of helping students move beyond limited world views toward having multiple perspectives?

5. When is a practice considered a "cultural norm"? Why? How do practices and products serve as "signposts" to a culture? What role do such "cultural norms" and "signposts" serve in learning and speaking a foreign language? Give a specific example from your teaching.