Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Corrie
Steven P. Cole
Research Design Associates
Cathleen Corrie
Emory University
ABSTRACT
This investigation examines whether foreign language (FL) students learn
cultural information embedded in videos. Fifty beginning French students
participated. They viewed eight targeted videos as part of their multimedia-based curriculum. A pretest and a posttest assessed long-term gains in
overall cultural knowledge and in the learning of little c culture (practices) and big C culture (products). Eight postvideo tests measured shortterm retention of culture in each of the eight videos. Oral dialogues tested
students ability to interact culturally appropriately in a communicative
setting. A questionnaire analyzed student perceptions of cultural learning.
From pre- to posttesting, results indicated a significant gain in overall
cultural knowledge. Posttest scores were significantly higher than pretest
scores. Pretest and posttest scores were significantly higher for little c
than for big C. On the postvideo tests, measuring short-term retention
of culture, there was no significant difference between types of culture
retained. Regarding oral performance, students performed culturally appropriately more than 60% of the time. Students perceived that the videos contained more little than big C culture and that they learned more
little c. Results support using video an effective technological tool for
presenting culture in the FL classroom.
2000 CALICO Journal
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INTRODUCTION
Cultural awareness has made its way to the core of educators concerns
in all disciplines. The 1998 American Educational Research Association
(AERA) conference in San Diego, CA was entitled Citizenship and Diversity in Multicultural Society. Foreign language (FL) teachers are certainly not indifferent to this trend. The same year, the American Council
on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) annual meeting gathered
under the title Winds of Change, and presenters devoted sessions to the
cultural dimension of the FL classroom. In fact, FL classes may present a
unique potential for strengthening intercultural education by teaching not
only the language but also the culture in which it is embedded (Singerman,
1996). Learning about another culture is a fundamental goal in the FL
classroom. Two performance guidelines, the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (1986) for adult language users and the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (1998) for K-12 learners include sections on cultural competence as
well as linguistic performance. Lange (1999, p. 57) affirms that language
cannot be taught without cultural content.
Video has been touted as a fruitful source for teaching culture as it
presents students with an image of living, vibrant people (Shrum & Glisan,
1994, p. 249). Martinez-Gibson (1998) points out that todays students
are part of the television era and that they are therefore more visually
oriented. These assertions suggest that video could facilitate students learning of a foreign culture. However, very little classroom research documents that FL video actually enhances the teaching of a foreign culture.
The current research attempts to fill this void by investigating how much
and what kind of culture beginning French students learn from a videobased curriculum.
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Official FL guidelines regarding the teaching of culture give specific
criteria for instructional goals. A professional consensus regarding what
students should know about culture as a result of their FL study was reached
with the publication of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century (1996). While the first goal emphasizes standards
for communication, the second goal stresses the importance of learning
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RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The purpose of this study is to investigate the following research questions:
1. Does beginning French students overall knowledge of French
culture improve over the course of one semester when exposed
to a video-based curriculum?
2. Do beginning French students retain more little c or big C
culture when exposed to culture embedded in a video-based
curriculum?
3. Is there a significant difference for beginning French students
between the short-term retention of little c and big C culture immediately after watching each video?
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METHODOLOGY
Participants
The FiA package was the instructional program for all four sections. FiA
uses a planned immersion approach to teaching foreign languages. In other
words, students are plunged into the French language through a storyline
that, though scripted, exposes them to both authentic language and authentic situations. The language spoken by the actors proceeds at a normal pace, but the care with which the script has been written reveals a
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Target Videos
The study included eight target videos: videos 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
and 15 (listed both in the order in which they appear in the FiA series and
in which they were taught). During the fall semester, four classes participated in the experiment. Each class watched the same video on the same
day.
Teaching Procedures
All four sections followed the same procedure: the video of the week
was shown in class on the same day without interruption. That viewing
was the first time all students in the four sections saw the new video. The
teachers provided no introductory remarks about the video. The students
watched the 10-minute teleplay in its entirety and did not take notes while
watching. After this initial viewing, no further discussion took place during that particular class session about the video. Following this initial inclass viewing, students were free to watch the videos outside of class in
the language laboratory. The following week, teachers also replayed the
video in class, intervening to check comprehension, before the weekly
quiz.
To assess the effect of video on cultural knowledge over time, all students in the four classes took a multiple-choice pretest at the beginning of
the semester, prior to watching the first of the target videos. At the end of
the semester, after the last of the target videos was shown, an identical
posttest was administered. The teachers informed the students that neither the pretest nor the posttest would count toward their final grade in
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(Big C)
(Little c)
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(Big C)
SCORING OF PRE/POSTTEST
Each test item was worth 1 point; incorrect answers received 0 points,
and correct answers 1 point. A participants pre/posttest score was computed by dividing the total number of points awarded by the total number
of points possible. Beside the total score, the little c score and the big
C score were calculated by the same process. The pretest and the posttest
were scored in the same manner. Three judges blindly scored students
responses on the pre- and posttests to establish interjudge accuracy. All
three judges scored all pre- and posttests. The interjudge accuracy was
100% on the pretest and 99.8% on the posttest. Once the scoring errors
were identified, the data were corrected.
RELIABILITY OF PRE/POSTTEST
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.28
.54**
T1
c2
.16
.35+
3
C
.40*
.63***
T2
T
c
C
.61**
.58***
.56**
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Each answer to the four cultural assimilator questions was worth 1 point.
A grid of criteria was constituted for each question, regarding what constituted a right answer. An answer was either totally correct (1 point) or
totally incorrect (0 points). Thus, for both types of culture, each participant received a score between 0 and 2 points. Each category of culture
(little c and big C) received a separate score that was computed by
adding the total number of students across categories of exposure. For
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At the end of the semester, all students answered a cultural questionnaire. (See the sample culture questionnaire in Appendix C.) At the top of
the questionnaire students found a definition of little c and big C culture to guide them in answering the questions. The questionnaire included
open-ended questions asking students for comments about the presentation of Culture/culture in FiA and comments about their learning of Culture/culture from this method. It also questioned the students about their
perceptions of the learning of culture as well as their perception on how
much culture they thought was presented in their class through FiA. Finally, students answered questions regarding whether they had previous
experiences in France or previous exposure to FiA (and, if so, under what
circumstances) so as to cross reference this information with that obtained
at the beginning of the semester on the general information sheet. Students were also asked for possible exposure to French or other cultures
and languages through noneducational settings (e.g., family members,
friends, or an extensive stay in another country). Out of 45 students who
provided information regarding exposure to a foreign (i.e., nonAmerican)
culture, 9 (20.0%) reported having been exposed to French through family or friends, and 14 (31.1%) reported having been significantly exposed
to another culture through study programs, family, travel, or work.
SCORING OF QUESTIONNAIRE
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Item Analysis
Prior to assessing the research questions, a set of analyses was conducted to assess item difficulties for the little c and big C items separately. Analyses were conducted for the pretest, postvideo quizzes, and
the assimilator items. To evaluate possible item difficulty between mean
scores for the pretest, t-tests for independent samples were conducted.
There was initially a significant difference between the mean difficulty for
little c (M = .57, SD = .17) and big C (M = .31, SD = .22) items, t (14)
= -2.60, p <. 05. Items that had a difficulty superior to 90% or inferior to
10% were removed (i.e., items number 1big C, number 4little c,
and item number 14little c). A second t-test for independent samples
was conducted on the remaining 13 items and there was no statistically
significant difference between little c items (M = .49, SD = .11) and big
C items (M = .34, SD = .21), t (11) = -1.52, p = .16. Means and standard
deviations for the pre- and posttest (after correction) are presented in
Table 3.
Table 3
French 101 StudentsPre- and Posttest Means (and Standard Deviations)
by Type of Culture
Pretest
Posttest
Little c
0.48 (0.20)
0.85 (0.19)
0.66 (0.20)
Big C
0.33 (0.20)
0.57 (0.22)
0.45 (0.20)
Total
0.40 (0.20)
0.71 (0.19)
To evaluate possible item difficulty between mean scores for the postvideo
quizzes, t-tests for independent samples were conducted. There was initially a statistically nonsignificant trend for the difference between the
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0.59 (0.15)
0.60 (0.17)
*p < .05.
**p < .01.
***p <.001.
Means and standard deviations for the assimilator are presented in Table
5. With respect to the oral component of the study (research question 4),
a t-test for paired samples was conducted to assess the difference in ability
between types of culture. There was no statistically significant difference
between little c scores (M = 1.23, SD = .76) and big C scores (M =
1.13, SD = .76) in students ability to produce a culturally appropriate
utterance (see Table 5).
Table 5
French 101 StudentsAssimilator Means (and Standard Deviations) by
Type of Culture
Little c
Big C
Assimilator
1.23 (0.76)
1.13 (0.76)
1.18 (0.54)
To evaluate the association between the performance on the assimilator
and other performances, Pearson product-moment correlations were conducted. There was a statistically significant correlation between students
performance on the assimilator and their total postvideo quiz score, r (24)
= .54, p < .01. Students who received a high score on the assimilators
tended to receive a high total score on the postvideo tests. There was no
statistically significant correlation between performance on the assimilator and either pretest scores (r (28) = .11, p = .56) or posttest scores (r
(28) = -.06, p = .75).
Regarding students perceptions (research question 5), 64.5 % thought
that a lot or a vast amount of little c culture was presented in the videos
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ANALYSIS OF RESULTS
Question 1: Does beginning French students overall knowledge of French
culture improve over the course of one semester when exposed to a videobased curriculum?
The findings of the present study suggest that first semester students of
French can improve their general cultural knowledge over the course of a
semester through exposure to an instructional video series. At the beginning of the semester, students took a pretest on cultural information to
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This semester, we are going to learn a lot about France and the French
language through the French in Action series. Before we go any further,
we would like to find out what you already know. Read the following
items and circle the answer that you find most appropriate. There is only
one possible answer to each item.
I. La France
1. What is the MLF? (big C)
a. A political party.
b. A union.
c. A feminist organization. *
d. A student organization.
2. When French children say Tonton, to whom do they refer? (little
c)
a. A parent.
b. Their uncle. *
c. A close friend.
d. An ancestor.
3. What is the name of the region on the Western side of France? (C)
a. Provence.
b. Burgundy.
c. Alsace.
d. Brittany. *
4. What do French people typically eat for a midday snack? (c)
a. Pastries. *
b. Chips and dip.
c. Nuts.
d. Candies.
5. On a vacation, if it rains, French people would probably (c)
a. surf the Internet.
b. go to the movies. *
c. chat on the phone.
d. drive around to see sites.
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II. Le Franais.
1. Nous allons __________ le franais.
a. tudie
b. tudier *
c. tudions
d. tudiez
2. Cest lhistoire dune jeune fille __________.
a. franaise *
b. amricain
c. franaises
d. franais
3. Les Brsiliens __________ portugais.
a. parler
b. parlons
c. parlent *
d. parlez
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APPENDIX B
French 101Cultural Assimilator
A Vous la Parole
In the following four scenes, you are asked to perform orally one of the
two parts. The scene always takes place between two characters and you
enact one of the two. Before each scene, you are provided with some information about the context in which the scene takes place. In the part
that you will play, there is a blank that you are supposed to fill in as you
speak.
This does not count toward your final grade. It is merely a means for us
to know how well you would be able to interact in an authentic conversation in French.
Scene 1: LOffice du Tourisme. (Big C)
This scene takes place in the tourism office in Paris. An American tourist
enters the office to inquire about possible attractions. You play the
employees part and your instructor plays the tourists part.
Tourist:
Employee:
Tourist:
(Tourist:
Employee:
Tourist:
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Name:
One aspect of learning French is learning about French culture. Some of
that culture we hear about in history classes and textbooks: this involves
knowledge of French institutions (educational, political, etc.), of geography and the environment, of history, and of literature and the arts. Such
aspects of French civilization fall into the category of big C culture.
For example, a question about big C culture might ask, Name a wine
region of France, or What biblical scene is depicted on the front door of
Chartres cathedral? However, a definition of culture also includes aspects of lifestyle. More specifically, this little c culture includes knowledge of daily patterns of living (social patterns and habits, values, and
conventions). For example, a little c culture question might ask, What
do the French typically eat with red wine? or Where do French people
typically go for a quick meal?
We would like to hear your opinion of how well French in Action teaches
both kinds of culture. More particularly, we would like to know your opinion on both how well culture was presented in the videos, and how well
you have learned this material.
1. In Fr 102, how much big C culture was presented in the videos?
1
virtually
none
2
a little
3
a moderate
amount
4
a lot
5
a vast
amount
2
a little
3
a moderate
amount
4
a lot
5
a vast
amount
3. In Fr 102, how much big C culture do you think you learned from
the videos?
1
virtually
none
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2
a little
3
a moderate
amount
4
a lot
5
a vast
amount
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2
a little
3
a moderate
amount
4
a lot
5
a vast
amount
9. Prior to your coming to Emory, had you ever been exposed to French
in Action?
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CALICO 2000
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