Exploring the Pros and Cons of MIT's Cultura Program

The Language and Culture Learning Center was given the task of exploring MIT's Cultura Program for a possible model for setting up international language exchanges at UIC. 


What is Cultura?
"Cultura is a Web-based, intercultural project situated in a language class, that connects American students with other students in different countries. Designed and created in 1997 by a team from the French Section at MIT (Gilberte Furstenberg, Sabine Levet and Shoggy Waryn), and developed thanks to an initial grant from the Consortium for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning and a subsequent one from the National Endowment for the Humanities, it was originally created as an exchange between American and French students. Cultura has since been adapted to other schools and languages, connecting students in the US with students in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia and Spain.

Cultura is not the only Web-based intercultural project of its kind, but it is particularly well-known for its pedagogically sound design, approach and methodology, allowing students from different cultures to gradually construct together, via a common Website and a computer-mediated exchange, a deeper understanding of each other’s cultural attitudes, beliefs and values."(http://cultura.mit.edu/)

What are the positive and negative aspects of employing Cultura?

1. Students produce their language so they receive input for listening and reading, but they don’t receive as much output practice in writing and speaking in the target language.
2. If students are going to test their “cultural hypothesis,” then they need to be exposed to multiple speakers ie. one native speaker in French cannot speak for all French people and their culture.
3. The conversations are directed and the students are involved in a lot of frontloading activities to help them direct their conversation, which is a plus because the conversation could potentially fizzle very fast if the students aren’t given enough material. Activities include things such as prompted discussions on culture class. Also, the site recommends taking about a week to prep students for the activity, which could turn into more time once you add in the time that students will need to dedicate towards learning the required software.
4. First Stage: It is very positive that the students engaged in the exchange have a task to complete (ie discussing differences between the two countries) whereas if the two students are just connected with nothing specific to talk about than the conversation could die out or become awkward very quickly.
5. First Stage: The cultura project also builds students cultural awareness by activating students schemata through prompting them to examine their preconceived notions or stereotypes regarding other cultures.
6. First Stage: Piliminary Activity 5-- This activity could aid students in examining what they bring to a text when they are interpreting it which is a useful reading strategy for building comprehension and could potentially transfer to the regular content of the course. For example, the instructor could draw attention to the idea that they are going to be thinking about how they are interpreting the text and changing how the text is presented to fit their expectations. Then the instructor should note to the students that they should be thinking in this metacognitive fashion when they approach all texts in the class. There are schema theories that suggest that a text doesn’t mean anything until a reader brings their prior knowledge and experiences to the text and then filters it through their lens, which means that it is highly unlikely that two people will interpret the same text in the same way. Drawing students’ attention to the idea that their impressions of the text matter or are valid can be a larger hurdle in engaging students with written texts.
7. Follow up in class activity: Vocabulary: This section of the lesson plans needs to be vastly increased from the students just saying words aloud to engaging the students in activities that will enable them to master the terms and use them as part of their lexicon, which will improve the quality of the students’ conversation because it will enhance their level of fluency.
1. Perhaps focusing on the vocabulary that students are learning in a particular section would be a better use of time, and then the conversation prompts for the next conversation could revolve around whatever theme associates vocabulary in the textbook (ie. transportation, food, etc). This once again would provide students with the opportunity to reuse terms that they need to learn for class.
2. Also, the students could create a self-generated vocabulary list based on what communication blocks they experienced during their conversation with the native speaker. Research on Vocabulary pedagogy has suggested that self-generated vocabulary lists often get a better response (as far as the students’ ability to master the terms and reuse them in their own speech) than the lists that the teacher or textbook has generated.
3. Another variation of this vocabulary activity could be having the native speaker generate a list of words that they think would be helpful for their partner to know based on the conversation that they have. Then, the native speaker could also gage their partner’s level of mastery of the concepts and their pronunciation based on future conversations. This would provide an authentic assessment of the students’ communicative competence as judged by an native speaker in the target language. Also, it would give the cultural exchange partners to continue their contact with one another and give the conversation sessions a purposeful connection to one another.
8. The project’s general commitment to adding an authentic cultural awareness back into the curriculum is impressive. Most of the foreign language classrooms I have been a part of include cultural facts that we were tested on, but there wasn’t any interaction with the culture. One way UIC could use this format in order to bring authentic culture in the classroom is to include more realia from the target culture so that the conversations in the target language revolve around specific cultural artifacts.
9. The cultural awareness factor may take a little more work than the website indicates because many students need help when it comes to metacognition. Also, students may need help articulating hypothesises in a respectful manner because talking about stereotypes or “cultural hypothesis” can sometimes lead into conversations that are inappropriate depending upon the teacher’s definition of appropriate. Hopefully, if students feel negatively about the culture, then those feelings can be reversed through the cultura experience.
10. Current Exchanges: on the Current Exchanges page, there doesn’t appear to be much activity (Every month on average there are about 2 exchanges and usually one of the partners is MIT). This could be problematic because the level of commitment on both sides needs to be high if the instructors are going to be able to create a meaningful exchange. For example, if a teacher in France sets aside a lot of time to work with cultura in their syllabus and the teacher in the United States doesn’t display an equal amount of commitment, then the project could be detrimental to the French teacher’s lesson planning, and it may cause the teacher to avoid such projects in future semesters. Therefore, it is a good idea that teachers in both countries and a specific and shared understanding about how many hours a week they will be investing in this tool.