This volume offers diverse perspectives on language and culture teaching explored against the background of a fast-paced globalized world of increased mobility and opportunity. While teachers are pressed to reinvent and adapt the existing teaching practices, researchers are invited to conduct studies with a view of implementing the findings in the classroom practice. This collection presents discussions of different aspects of foreign language instruction, language skills and learning strategies, and foreign languages in professional contexts, as well as the role of intercultural competence in language teaching and teacher education. Offering insights into a variety of foreign language and culture teaching contexts throughout Europe, this volume will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in applied linguistics and language and culture teaching methodology, including both experienced and novice language teachers, in the Balkan region and beyond.

The history of "language teaching" is shot through with methods and approaches to language learning - most recently with "communicative language teaching" - but this book demonstrates that a more differentiated and richer understanding of learning a foreign language is both necessary and desirable. Languages and cultures are interlinked and interdependent and their teaching and learning should be too. Learning another language is part of a complex process of learning and understanding other people's ways of life, ways of thinking and socio-economic experience

This wide-ranging survey of issues in intercultural language teaching and learning covers everything from core concepts to program evaluation, and advocates a fluid, responsive approach to teaching language that reflects its central role in fostering intercultural understanding. Includes coverage of theoretical issues defining language, culture, and communication, as well as practice-driven issues such as classroom interactions, technologies, programs, and language assessment Examines systematically the components of language teaching: language itself, meaning, culture, learning, communicating, and assessments, and puts them in social and cultural context Features numerous examples throughout, drawn from various languages, international contexts, and frameworks Incorporates a decade of in-depth research and detailed documentation from the authors’ collaborative work with practicing teachers Provides a much-needed addition to the sparse literature on intercultural aspects of language education

Offers some theoretical innovations in teaching foreign languages and reports how they have been applied to curriculum development and experimental courses at the upper secondary and college levels. Approaches language learning as comprising several dimensions, including grammatical competence, change in attitudes, learning about another culture, and reflecting on one's own. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The goal of this text is to help teachers in diverse classrooms understand the importance of students’ culture, languages, and schooling experiences to curriculum, assessment, and student achievement. Readers will learn about aspects of specific cultures and languages that are important to their understanding of their students, and they will discover that cultures that are often considered similar may not be so (and why they aren't). Finally, the text focuses on how teachers can integrate languages and cultures into classrooms and how to account for students' backgrounds and funds of knowledge when devising tasks. The text starts with an introduction to language and culture that presents a research?based explanation of why these concepts are important for teachers to understand (Chapter 1). Then, the middle 28 chapters each address one country/culture. Each chapter starts with a school scenario in the US. Part 2 of each chapter includes evidence?based demographic and background data on the country, including historical events that may have an impact on our students and their families. Part 3 includes a look at education, schooling, and culture, including famous people, contributions to the world, personal characteristics, important religious information, focal customs, and other aspects that are important to cultural insiders. Part 4 is about language and literacy traditions and how they relate to the culture, a number of words that teachers can learn (e.g., yes, no, thank you, please, hello), how the language is different from and similar to English, and what those differences and similarities might mean for English language learners from that culture. Part 5 comprises advice, resources, and ideas for teachers (for example, if it is an oral culture, the teacher might consider working with students on oral storytelling before transitioning to written stories, or incorporate both using technology). Each chapter also contains recommended readings and resources and short exercises that extend the chapter information. The final chapter presents parting notes for teachers and additional suggestions for addressing diversity.

The paradigm shift intercultural language teaching is bringing to the profession is explored by various contributors to this volume who look closely at what it means to teach culture as an integrated part of language, from both the language student and the language teacher's perspective.

Topics in Language and Culture for Teachers is an introductory language and culture text designed for today's future teachers, anthropologists, and applied linguists. The book explores, from a variety of perspectives, the interrelationships between language and culture that have the most significant implications for the classroom and for the global community. Among the topics introduced are first language acquisition, dialects, sign language, non-verbal communication, and pragmatics. Each chapter is structured so that students will read about a topic, answer comprehension questions, consider relevant teaching scenarios, gather and analyze data in further reading, and pursue projects that require out-of-class research. The book also encourages the use of films to provide deeper cultural understanding and context for various issues. Three appendixes-the family tree of languages, language structure, resources for further research and professional development-and a glossary are included.

Drawing on sociocultural theories of learning, this book examines how the everyday language practices and cultural funds of knowledge of youth from non-dominant or minoritized groups can be used as centerpoints for classroom learning in ways that help all students both to sustain and expand their cultural and linguistic repertoires while developing skills that are valued in formal schooling. Bringing together a group of ethnographically grounded scholars working in diverse local contexts, this volume identifies how these language practices and cultural funds of knowledge can be used as generative points of continuity and productively expanded on in schools for successful and inclusive learning. Ideal for students and researchers in teaching, learning, language education, literacy, and multicultural education, as well as teachers at all stages of their career, this book contributes to research on culturally and linguistically sustaining practices by offering original teaching methods and a range of ways of connecting cultural competencies to learning across subject matters and disciplines.

Dramatic Interactions is a collection of essays on the flourishing and interdisciplinary subject of teaching foreign languages, literatures, and cultures through theater. With rich examples from a variety of commonly and less commonly taught languages, this book affirms both the relevance and effectiveness of using theater for foreign language learning in the most comprehensive sense of the term. It includes innovative approaches to specific theatrical texts and addresses numerous aspects of foreign language learning such as oral proficiency and communication, intercultural competence, the role of affect and motivation in foreign language study, multiple literacies, regional variations and dialect, literary analysis and adaptation, and the overall liberating effects of verbal and non-verbal self-expression in the foreign language. Dramatic Interactions renders accessible, efficacious, and enjoyable the study of languages, literatures, and cultures through theater with the hope of inspiring and facilitating the greater incorporation of theatrical texts and techniques in foreign language courses at every level.

"This book takes cultural knowledge in language learning not only as a necessary aspect of communicative competence, but as an educational objective in its own right. If the aim of foreign language education is to foster cross-cultural awareness and self-realization, language pedagogy needs to come to grips with a range of fundamental issues: what do we mean by cultural context? Can discourse practices be taught like rules of grammar? What role does literature play in the development of second language literacy? How can learners acquire both an insider's and an outsider's understanding of the foreign culture as expressed through its language? By exploring these and other issues, the book can help language teachers reflect on their profession and place it within its larger societal and educational context. In turn, they can help learners become not only skilful users of the language, but also active architects of a new cross-cultural world order.".