Alumni Connection - May 2005: Resources for Student Learning: Finding, Evaluating, and Using Culturally Authentic Materials

Resources for Student Learning: Finding, Evaluating, and Using Culturally Authentic Materials - Part II

"Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature."

Welcome to the May 2005 electronic newsletter of the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center!

Have you been to any potluck dinners lately? Have you ever thought about how well they mirror the "meals" we "serve" in our language classes? The procession of food is frequently led by an assortment of salads. They are served because of their nutritional value (i.e. they adhere to national, state, district, and local mandates) and children who are told they have to put some on their plates typically insist, "But I don't like lettuce (vocabulary lists and grammar)!" That statement is usually countered with an explanation that includes phrases like "bunny food," "roughage," and "I promise that if you hold your nose you won't even taste it!" Some children whine enough that they even manage to avoid the tossed salad completely, negotiating a scoop of Jello salad instead ("fun" activities whipped up from recipes gathered at the latest conference). Parents, thinking of the nutritional value of the fruit hidden within the Jello, are pleased that their children are at least eating something healthy.

The salads are usually followed by a succession of easy-to-prepare casseroles (a.k.a. worksheets) that represent the underlying philosophy of feeding the largest number possible with a minimum of fuss. The kids, resigned to the likelihood that they won't get dessert if they don't eat some "real food," heave sighs of relief if they can at least manage to avoid the casseroles with broccoli in them. Sometimes there is a main dish that is relatively complicated to prepare or to transport. That feat of culinary construction and engineering is guaranteed to receive lots of ooohs and ahhhs and other assorted expressions of praise from those heaping their plates with it for the dedicated effort and commitment that the chef has exerted on behalf of the group. However, since the effort required to prepare such dishes is typically extensive, they are not particularly abundant at such gatherings, and because servings of enduring understanding can be rather pricey, when such a dish is served, there is often only enough for those lucky enough to be first through the line.

"Potluck parades" are usually topped off with an assortment of desserts, including several packages of store-bought cookies that satisfy everyone's craving for something sweet, yet are quick and easy to "prepare." If you watch, though, you'll find that the homemade cookies almost always disappear first. If everyone likes homemade cookies so much, why don't more people bring them? Have you baked a batch of cookies lately? Doing so can certainly be a time-consuming and messy endeavor—especially if you choose to involve kids in the process! First, you have to get out all of the ingredients. Sometimes, that means that you have to pull everything out of the cupboard in order to find what you are looking for, only to discover that you have to run to the store for it because it has expired. Once you return from the store, you might have to return to get something that you thought you had in your cupboard. Once you finally have all the ingredients and have measured them into the bowl, you have to mix them up. Novices will often find that the bowl they have chosen is too small, so they have the added frustration of having to transfer the ingredients into another one. The next step requires close attention so that the cookies don't burn (and so your helpers don't burn themselves)! A new batch has to be put into the oven about every 8 to 10 minutes and there is usually a big mess to clean up (because novices don't usually know to put the mixing bowl filled with dough into the sink before they run the hand mixer, so the dough splatters onto both the walls AND the floor instead of remaining contained in and around the sink, where it is easy to clean up)! Suddenly, the popularity of store-bought cookies begins to make sense! So, why go to all the trouble of baking? One look, one whiff, one bite of a homemade cookie is all it takes to answer that question! You do not have to be a professional chef to notice and appreciate the contrasts in texture, in smell, in taste, and in enjoyment that result from the differences in the ingredients, in the purpose, and in the process used to make them.

Whipping up lessons in a language classroom isn't all that much different. Students do not have to be very experienced language learners to notice and appreciate the differences in a classroom that serves up lessons made from culturally authentic materials and one that does not. This is especially important to keep in mind because dessert (i.e. interest in eating cultural "cookies") is one of the major reasons that beginning students continue with language study. In this issue, we encourage you to think about the kind of "cookies" you are serving in your classroom, provide some new recipes for you to try, and offer some thoughts on how you might select pre-packaged cookies more carefully on those occasions when you don't have time to bake!

Cherice Montgomery, Newsletter Editor
Marcia Rosenbusch, Director, National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center
Julio C. Rodriguez, Web Designer

How can I use research-based strategies and culturally authentic resources to help students develop communicative and intercultural competence?

" In practice, teachers teach language and culture, or culture in language, but not language as culture."

So, how do we get our students to enjoy the salads and casseroles as much as they do the cookies? Improving the quality of the ingredients we are using is a great place to begin! A recent statement by The College Board announcing that it is expanding its Advanced Placement offerings to include Chinese, Japanese, and Russian Language and Culture by May of 2007 and encouraging long sequences of instruction and equitable enrollment in AP courses might encourage school administrators to do just that!

In the meantime, what about your classroom? Are the lessons you are serving made from culturally authentic ingredients or laden with preservatives? Attending to the combination of flavors that our ingredients produce is another promising place to start. Culture in Second Language Teaching is an ERIC digest that will help you to think about how you might combine language and culture to produce flavors that would otherwise be unattainable! When your students ask for a second helping, you might enjoy sharing some of the ideas from Components of Language, a PowerPoint presentation that draws on examples from a variety of countries to show how language and culture are related. If you are interested in learning even more about how the National Standards can help students to achieve intercultural competence, spend a few minutes viewing this Culture and Comparisons PowerPoint Presentation, or for something a little more substantial, take a look at Culture Learning in Language Education: A Review of the Literature, a 73-page document that provides a comprehensive look at the teaching and learning of culture in language education. Are you still hungry for more? Then this Bibliography: Culture Learning, Intercultural Communication, and Language Learning from CARLA is sure to fill you up with its nicely categorized references that you can use to further explore the links between language and culture.

What do I do with the culturally authentic materials I find?

"One of the marks of professionalism in teaching is precisely being able to make the adjustments or to create the improvisations that will render the materials effective."

The culinary creations of the best chefs in the world are often inspired by raw ingredients. If you haven't yet developed the imagination required to create masterpieces from piles of culturally authentic materials, perhaps you and your students haven't been eating enough cookies! Did you know that Oreos can teach you all sorts of important principles that will help you to use culturally authentic resources more effectively? They teach us that as we seek to integrate the Cultures, Connections, and Comparisons goals of the National Standards, we will get better at helping students systematically build and balance their understanding of their own cultures with understanding of the target cultures. Oreos also teach us the importance of providing a carefully planned and sequenced set of experiences for students that will lead them, one cookie at a time, to the realization that cultural understanding can be of great value. Oreos also remind us that students need hands-on opportunities to try out the things they are learning and that if we want our students to become cultural cookie monsters, we must give them opportunities to learn that cultures (and cookies) are good for more than just eating!

When you are ready to try making your own cookies, you might first wish to consult Creating Standards-based Activities Integrating Authentic Resources from the WWW, a brief article by Jean LeLoup and Bob Pontiero that describes how to find authentic materials on the World Wide Web, explains principles for using them to design pedagogically sound, standards-based language learning activities for students, and offers multiple examples that can be accessed online.

Do you need an easy recipe for involving your students in the cookie-making process? Role Play in Teaching Culture: Six Quick Steps for Classroom Implementation should do the trick! If your creativity needs an additional boost, The Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching is definitely the tool for you. As you browse these articles, you'll discover research-based ideas for using dress-up biographies, dance, drama, fantasy, folktales, films, literary pantomimes, mental holography, novels, opera, poetry, and reader's theater as tools for using culture to teach language to learners of all different levels.

Where can I find examples of lessons and activities that are grounded in culturally authentic materials?

"It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly."

What we ask students to do with the materials we find shapes the kind of learning they can do. So, what kinds of cookie cutters are you using as patterns these days? Have you tried the Communication Cookie Cutter? If not, visit The Year of Languages Talkin' About Talk page to hear short radio essays on topics ranging from Southern dialects and sign language to learning Arabic. For a model in a language other than English, explore Ojalá que llueva café. It provides a beautiful example of how one might integrate music, photos, maps, and other culturally authentic materials to support student learning. Students can listen to Juan Luis Guerra's song and can click on each vocabulary word in order to access pop-up definitions, photos, and links to additional information. The site also contains a gallery of photos from the Dominican Republic, maps, a plethora of online exercises that help students to work with the present subjunctive in Spanish, and links to other useful resources.

If you were as impressed as I was, then you'll want to try the Cultures Cookie Cutter: Spanish Grammar Exercises. Huh?! Yes, we meant Cultures even though there is a significant amount of grammar involved! These PHENOMENAL activities by Barbara Kuczun Nelson use culturally authentic materials as the core of activities that are designed to strengthen students' understanding of grammatical principles. Students can explore cultural topics (Day of the Dead, San Fermín) and social issues (such as ecology and homelessness), can listen to songs by groups like Maná and poetry by Juan Ramón Jiménez, and can also read stories and view videos about things that happen to people in various Spanish-speaking countries.

Taller hispano (in Spanish) and Civilisation français (in French) are great places to find Comparisons Cookie Cutters. They contain links to FANTASTIC online activities that ask students to look at photos, listen to sound clips in the target language, and read information on a variety of cultural topics, including Spanish/French cuisine, family, schools, economy, religion, pets, shopping, etc., before answering online questions about them that help them to think more about similarities and differences between cultures. (Scroll down to the bottom of the screen in order to see the full table of contents.)

The Communities Cookie Cutter ¿Quién soy yo? is the result of a collaborative effort between teachers from schools around the world to help their students explore meaningful questions such as Who am I? Where do I live? What are my rights? What are my roots? Information and photos about these topics are exchanged by students in languages such as Arabic, Catalán, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Saami, Spanish, and Swedish. Each module is divided into a series of sub-lessons that touch on topics such as conflict resolution, safety, career exploration, dealing with loss, and people with special needs, and are also accompanied by discussion questions and suggestions for activities. If you prefer a cookie cutter that requires a little less coordination to operate, then the All Aboard the Metro PowerPoint presentation will be a better choice for you. It outlines the steps to using authentic, online metro maps as the basis for a student research project on French history and culture.

Connections Cookie Cutters come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and thematic units often provide a very useful container for storing them. If you've forgotten the key principles of designing thematic units from February's newsletter, view the PowerPoint Making it Meaningful: The Power of Standards-based, Thematic Units for a quick refresher! Russian Weather Proverbs is the page to visit for a detailed, interdisciplinary lesson plan that encourages students to analyze Russian folk sayings about weather, compare meteorological data with predictions obtained from popular weather proverbs, and to expand their knowledge of folklore from other countries. Exploring Twentieth Century Latin America Through Film is a standards-based unit that seeks to expose students to cultural practices and perspectives through the films La historia oficial, Eréndira, and The Buena Vista Social Club. If your students liked that unit, then you'll want to visit CyberGuides—Foreign Language: Spanish, a site that contains a variety of units based on authentic pieces of children's literature in Spanish. Although they are not all organized thematically, many of them contain high quality activities and materials that could easily be incorporated into a thematic unit. For some cookie decorating ideas in Japanese, Russian, or Spanish styles, visit the arts-based activities grounded in authentic culture available at The Kennedy Center's ArtsEdge. To add some historical food coloring, drop in a few notes in French on various historical periods, related images, and Real Audio clips from De la Renaissance a la Revolución. For some musical sprinkles with a French twist, check out this site on Carole Fredericks, where you'll find ideas for integrating authentic French music into your classroom from Nancy Gadbois (Curriculum Institute, 1994, 1996, 1997; New Technologies, 1995; 1998; Summer Academy, 2002). To watch a 22-minute video segment of Nancy in action, go to Teaching Foreign Languages—Assessment and click on the Watch the Video icon. ( Nancy's segment begins about 5 minutes and 30 seconds after the video starts.)

Where else could I get ideas for projects that students could do with culturally authentic materials?

"Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality."

The variety of projects that students can do with culturally authentic materials are limited only by your imagination. All you have to do is think of your favorite things and do a Google Image Search for that word in your target language. Take cookies, for example! J Students could work together in groups to create cartoons about the topic (for instance, students of the Chinese language could create Fortune Cookie Cartoons like these, but in their target language). Students of Spanish might be interested in creating catalogues of their favorite cookies after browsing this one, or might be inspired by one of the projects or activities from Unidades temáticas de Oaxaca. Students studying German might have more fun taking digital pictures of their pets Purzel, Trixi und Schnuffel im Meerschweinchen-Schlaraffenland and then creating stories about their search for rodent cookies! If Russian is your language, then your students might enjoy perusing this advertising company's site to get ideas for creating their own product logos and packaging, print ads, and commercials for sweet treats, soup, meat, and other assorted products. (Click on the pictures to make the movies play and click on the arrows at the end of each row for more video clips.) You could use digital storytelling to document the process or to explore other cultural perspectives as people who participated in the Capture Wales project did. So, start passing out those cookies and Make Somebody Smile!

"The most significant kind of learning in virtually any field creates a desire to pursue learning in that field when one doesn't have to. . . . It stimulates appetite. And it is appetite that ensures, if anything can be ensured, that what was begun in school will be continued outside it."

The educational system at large has spent a considerable amount of time, money, and effort trying to identify all of the links in the story of assessment. However, it is often so pleased with its answers that it forgets the cyclical nature of the story that has emerged, and, therefore, continues to miss recurring opportunities to ask the questions that have been "long buried under answers" (Barone, 2001, p. 3)—questions like, What would happen if we tried a few new recipes, acknowledging that homemade cookies do not always come out well, but also recognizing that when they do, they might launch an entirely new story?!

Laura Joffe Numeroff's (1985) book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie implies that each exposure to a cultural product, practice, or perspective has the potential to begin, or to continue, a natural cycle of inquiry. It also suggests that you can tell a lot about the connections students are making by paying attention to the questions they ask. Such questions might lead to new insights—insights like the fact that the kind of cultural experiences that teachers provide for their students heavily influence their cultural tastes, or the fact that once students develop an appetite for culturally authentic materials, few will accept "store-bought cookies" as substitutes because they can "taste" the difference. This simple, one-page Concepts of Culture Rubric might give you some ideas for evaluating the progress of your students' taste buds!

What kinds of culturally authentic materials are new technologies making available?

"Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others."

There are all sorts of new technologies that are making it easier for people to bake "homemade cookies" with the joyful smiles of specific faces in mind instead of producing them for mass consumption. Internet cookies allow website designers to do just that! For more information about Internet cookies, visit How Stuff Works and use the scroll down menu at the top of the page that appears to select the part of the explanation that is of most interest to you. When you have finished reading, this little cartoon is a great way to assess your reading comprehension!

One popular Internet technology that is making all kinds of culturally authentic materials available to the world is a weblog. These "blogs" are sort of like a cross between an unedited, online journal and a scrapbook in which people collect personal thoughts, images, links, etc., and publish them on the web for others to read. Some blogs are so popular that they are read by hundreds of people. It is also possible to take out free subscriptions to some blogs so that every time a new entry is posted, you will be notified by e-mail! Click here for a more technical description. To see an example, check out this blog written by a French-speaker who is living in Japan, or this one with lots of interesting photos, or this one filled with puzzles and brainteasers. If none of these are of interest to you, you can find many more at Skynet, a portal for blogs in French.

Be sure to preview them, however, as the content of many of them is highly inappropriate for students. If you are interested in starting your own, try Blogger!

How can I use technology as a tool for developing meaningful materials?

"Just as all writing can be seen as a process of hypertextual design (whether the product looks like hypertext or not), so is teaching a process of representing a set of relationships between information partly to communicate a given set of connections, and partly to facilitate students' learning to make new connections on their own."

Are the demands of new technologies stretching you a little thin? Have you gathered a lot of online resources but aren't sure what to do with them now? This site offers ideas for Six Web and Flow Activity Formats that teachers can select based on their learning goals for students. There is a description of each format, tips for using it, and examples. Integrating Technology in the FL Classroom is a course syllabus that contains links to wonderful tutorials and ideas for foreign language teachers who are interested in using culturally authentic, technological resources as the basis for activities. Constructivist Inspiration: A Project-Based Model for L2 Learning in Virtual Worlds is an interesting article that offers suggestions for using problem-based learning in conjunction with the culturally authentic resources that are available on the Internet in order to provide students with cultural experiences through virtual trips. It also contains links to appendices that will take you to several beautifully constructed webquests that include lots of built-in tools to support student success.

How can I use technology as a tool for presenting materials effectively?

"Learning and understanding operate by making connections. We come to comprehend something when we can bring it into association with other things we already know. Mind and memory are themselves hyperenvironments."

"Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house."

"Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials."

"Every good painter paints what he is."

Culturally authentic resources can be found nearly everywhere-even in Iowa! Click here to see if you can guess what language community probably influenced this postcard.

Barone, Tom. (2001). Touching eternity: The enduring outcomes of teaching. NY: Teacher's College Press. ISBN 0-8077-4111-6.

Burbules, Nicholas C., & Callister, Jr., Thomas A. (2000). Watch IT: The risks and promises of information technologies for education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-9083-4.

Eisner, Elliot W. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09523-6.