While having served to help immigrant children develop a sense of ethnic identity and belonging, heritage schools have also been documented to reproduce an essentialised understanding of heritage culture by teaching heritage culture as fixed, stable, and homogenous. To help students move beyond an essentialised conception of heritage culture, the…

What images of the world do we find in language textbooks? What countries and continents are favoured, what key problems of the world are mentioned and taken up, what segments of the world's populations are represented and how, what role is given to the understanding of world history, colonialism and imperialism, what role is given to the…

Discusses theoretical issues concerning the role of cultural studies in second language instruction in the West, especially in Great Britain. Assumptions about existing approaches to cultural studies are discussed. Four areas for further work in cultural studies are suggested, and a theoretical model interrelating language and cultural instruction…

Discusses the historical background and community reaction to recent reforms in Northern Ireland's educational treatment of cultural heritage studies, highlighting the cross-curricular approach taken to cultural studies and changes affecting the status of the Irish language. (35 references) (Author/CB)

Landeskunde, or cultural studies, in Germany is a discipline trapped in a circle because the only avenues of development open to it relegate it to a subsidiary role within language education. If it is to develop in the long term, it will be necessary for it to define its objectives independently of language learning. (Contains five references.)…

Argues for centrality of living the ethnographic life for any cultural studies students spending a period of time abroad, as this approach is based on a methodology in which data and concepts illuminate each other. Language is no longer separated from social and cultural knowledge but "lived" and developed within a community in which the student…

The professional core of civilization/cultural studies (CCS) lies in the study of the relationship between context and discourse. Here, the necessity for the perspective of the outsider, combined with linguistic competence, creates the possibility of a distinctive disciplinary basis for CCS. (Author)

A trait of the scholarly tradition of France is explication de texte, associated in the past with philology and the translation of classical texts. This tradition reemerges as a compromise between demands of the communicative approach for practical language skills and the broader linguistic and cultural objectives of foreign language learning.…

Describes a university's experimental task-based French program that successfully integrated foreign language learning more fully with the learning of interpersonal skills and nonlinguistic content, although some language skills, especially those needed for advanced written language and translation, appeared to suffer. (14 references) (Author/CB)

The orientation of cultural studies at Roskilde University Centre (RUC) is interdisciplinary and thematic and incorporates science, language and literature, history, and psychology and the social sciences. An outline of RUC degree courses and sample project reports are appended. (Contains five references.) (Author)

A case study is provided of Chinese teachers' (n=16) views on culture in both their English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learning and teaching. Findings reveal participants' major support for the role of culture in their EFL learning, but also suggest the need for a greater understanding of how to incorporate culture into their own EFL classes. (JL)

Contrasts the communicative approach to foreign language teaching with a proposed cognitive-anthropological approach. The primacy of comprehension over action is argued, and topics are listed for foreign language/culture study that correspond to universals of human experience proposed by anthropologists. (Author/LMO)

The British Cultural Studies program at the University of Warwick emphasizes the cultural diversity of Britain. Content includes mythical, cultural, and gender discourses about Britain as they function in economic and political forms; the nexus of economy and culture; and national identities (e.g., Shakespeare). Some course material is appended.…

This paper shows how the opportunity to encounter the other culture "in my backyard" (IMBY) can be used in landeskunde. This approach moves away from landeskunde as piecemeal factual background information toward developing own-culture and foreign/target culture awareness in mixed groups of native language students. (Contains 15…

Investigated the potentiality that culture studies has to motivate Tawainese junior-high-school pupils to learn English, and tried to establish the relations between pupil interests in culture studies and their orientations, attitudes, and motivation toward learning English. Grade 1 and 2 students (n=480) from Taipei City and Taipei County…