Author(s): Wertsch, James V. | Abstract: Starting with the observation that the terms “memory” and “history” are used almost interchangeably in everyday discourse and professional academic discussion, I argue that they can and should be distinguished. Drawing on longstanding debates about nations and nationalism, it is possible to trace the roots of this distinction and see how it has taken on new significance in contemporary memory studies. I outline a few assumptions about humans as meaning makers, users of cultural tools, and “cognitive misers” and then turn to oppositions that have been drawn between collective memory and formal history. These concern the degree of subjectivity or objectivity involved, the source of authority for narrative tools, and the willingness to sacrifice evidence to preserve a narrative account about the past or vice versa. In order to translate these oppositions into more concrete means for discussing memory and history, I introduce a distinction between “specific narratives” and “narrative templates,” and I examine the source of “ethnocentric narcissism” that characterizes memory to a greater degree than history. Insight into this issue can be derived from drawing out William James’s comments on the “me-ness” of individual human memory to examine the “us-ness” of collective memory.

Author(s): Fichtner, Friederike; Chapman, Katie | Abstract: Foreign language teachers are often migrants. They have traveled and lived in other countries either to learn or to teach a language. In 2005, Domna Stanton characterized language teaching as a cosmopolitan act-- “a complex encounter made in a sympathetic effort to see the world as [others] see it and, as a consequence, to denaturalize our own views” (629). Do foreign language teachers ‘denaturalize’ their views of their native culture through their encounters with the other culture? Could it be that “engagement with the Other necessarily mean[s] an abnegation of the inherited culture” (Mani, 2007, p.29)?This study investigated not only in how far foreign language teachers affiliate with more than one culture but also how this cultural identity affects their classroom practice. To what extent do foreign language instructors claim multiple cultural identities? What advantages and disadvantages do foreign language instructors experience in the classroom in respect to their cultural identities? To what extent do foreign language instructors feel their cultural identity is relevant in the classroom? Results showed that foreign language instructors engage with their cultural affiliations intellectually, by embracing but not embodying “the other” culture.

Teaching Chinese cultural perspectives in CFL instruction is more challenging than teaching about Chinese cultural products and behavior. It is challenging because most textbooks do not orient their approach to it, because native-Chinese-speaking teachers tend to overlook it as it is so much a part of them that it presents no peculiarities, and because it is believed cultural understanding comes naturally once language is learned. Studies on cross-cultural communication demonstrate that cultural ignorance causes misperceptions and misunderstandings. In a global community, as people of different cultures interact with one another, awareness of different cultural perspectives is urgently needed. Since language and culture go hand in hand, learning a language is a fortunate opportunity to learn culture through language. Employing a critical language pedagogy, this paper provides an example for teaching Chinese cultural perspectives though discourse from film clips. It shows how students can be taught differences, alternatives, and critical language and cultural awareness using comparative, reflective, and interpretive methodologies. It employs a variety of situated activities to help students explore and discover the Chinese cultural mind.

This paper begins by arguing that the time has come for film, and film clips in particular, to take on a more central place in the foreign language curriculum. It describes in some detail the Library of Foreign Language Film Clips, a database of 10,000+ clips taken from foreign language feature films and tagged for the spoken vocabulary and for cultural, discourse, and linguistic features prominent in the clip. A number of issues that were confronted in the process of developing the database are described. Three ways in which film clips might be incorporated in the foreign language curriculum are then discussed: 1) by focusing on the spoken language; 2) by focusing on the clip as a representation of the behaviors or values of L2 speakers; and 3) by focusing on the clip as a text, whose meaning is created by the filmic devices and language spoken in the clip.

According to sociocultural approaches to second language acquisition (SLA), participation in communicative practices in the target language is the goal of language learning and a fundamental part of the acquisition process. One role of language instruction is to provide scaffolding that enables language learners to participate in communicative practices while their competence is still developing. This paper focuses on a particular communicative practice, oral discussions of assigned readings in a second-semester Spanish class at the university level, and explores the use of online forums to scaffold student participation in this communicative practice. Using a combination of qualitative methods, I show how an instructor used forums to prepare her students for class discussions while also increasing and diversifying student participation during those discussions. This outcome problematizes the assumption that only synchronous (e.g., chat) as opposed asynchronous (e.g., forums) modes of text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) can be beneficial for oral communication in foreign languages. Furthermore, it indicates that learning outcomes may depend more on the way in which CMC is integrated into instruction than on the specific characteristics of the technologies used.