week 8: GIVING A VIRTUAL VOICE TO THE SILENT LANGUAGE OF CULTURE: THE CULTURA PROJECT (Furstenberg et al., 2001)

The Cultura project that was used in this research seems very interesting and useful to teach (or learn) language along with culture. One thing that students can get an advantage from using Cultura is that they compare and analyzed two different cultures through languages. Not only they can learn about other cultures, they also practice and get in-depth knowledge about target languages. According to the article, it says that “students themselves gradually construct an understanding of the subject matter, at the intersection of language, communication, and culture.” L2 learners are not just learning about other cultures, but they utilize their target languages to communicate each other and understand different perspectives in using languages.

Language teachers try to bring culture into classroom and put lots of efforts to construct effective teaching methods. We all understand how important it is to understand culture in language learning. However, as the article stated, these cultural aspects are essentially elusive, abstract, and invisible; it is hard to make them visible, accessible and understandable.” In this matter, Cultura did a great job. The results showed that learners are able to construct their own approaches to the attitudes, values and concepts which underpin the ‘other’ culture. (Furstenberg  et al., 2001).

Ever since we had an access to World Wide Web and the advance of Web 2.0, it is no longer a problem to communicate with people who live in other countries and share different ideas, views and cultures. Learning language is a part of learning culture. Language possesses lots of things about one’s culture as it embraces idea, belief, perspectives and attitudes. Cultura seems a great way to encourage learners to discover their own view and at the same time to understand other views toward language use and it shows how technology can be effectively used for language learning.

Part 2: Using different writing programs to write collaborate

Writing together through blog and wiki seems great tools to work together; however, as we talked in class discussion, writing together is not always a better idea than writing individually. When I do editing other’s writing work during our lab session, I thought it would be better to have specific instruction or guideline about how to give advice on it. Since I am not used to comments about other’s writing, I was kind of lost which part I have to touch first. However, it was a great exercise for me and I think it would be great opportunity to language learners to recognize grammatical errors and writing skills.