Abstract
How do you pack a lifetime of knowledge of Culture/culture(s) into Classes?
Edward Hall (1959) defined culture as the following “culture is communication and communication is culture” .Even though such a statement may seem limited and too definitive, yet it does show the crucial importance of the role of culture within communication. Since one of the major aims in teaching Arabic is to ensure that learners of the language are able to communicate within various given contexts, and to facilitate intercultural communication, thus the teaching of culture becomes of paramount importance.
The question posed above is daunting to say the least and is one of the major challenges in the field of teaching Arabic to non-native speakers. The challenge is confounded when bearing in mind that there are many culture(s) - by cultures here it is meant behaviours, beliefs, popular culture, values, identity politics, religion(s), ideas and how they are manifested in language- within each society, and thus we should be aware of presenting a nuanced approach that accounts for socio-economic, geographical factors and the dynamism of culture rather than making generalizing pronouncements, while acknowledging that to help educators in the field standards and guidelines have to be given to help the students reach a higher level of cultural proficiency.
While some in the field have called for the teaching of culture(s) as a separate syllabus, interweaving the cultural aspects within various syllabi is the approach that will be discussed during this session due to the belief that this approach offers more diversity and room for a nuanced perspective, and since language and culture are often inseparable thus it allows the learners to receive the information in context(s). On teaching culture(s) through the syllabi, there will be four main focal points: social interactions and the accompanying language/gestures used with them and how this differs from one social context to another; the appropriate form of language usuage in Said Badawi’s continuum bearing in mind aspects such as power dynamics, gender, and urban/rural settings; particular occasions and their social and cultural significance; and finally ideas/terms/ items from popular culture that have had a lasting effect on the collective consciousness of many of society’s strata.
In the session, a focus on ECA and Egyptian Cinema in particular will take place with the showing of samples from these designed syllabi to illustrate the teaching of culture with its different aspects interweaved within the units.
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