| By placing culture squarely at the heart of language teaching and learning, the new Standards for Language Learning in the 21st Century have considerably broadened the second language teacher's task and responsibilities. The purpose of this interpretive study was to investigate high school foreign language teachers' conceptualizations of culture and culture learning, and to relate them to teachers' instructional practice.; All 14 high school foreign language teachers in one school district were interviewed, and four individual case studies of two French and two German teachers were carried out using semi-structured interviews, non-participant classroom observation, and analysis of instructional materials.; Results from interviews indicate that teachers share similar beliefs about the nature of culture, the importance of culture teaching, and the goal of developing learners' awareness of and tolerance for other cultures. Classroom observations reveal that culture teaching occurs separately from language instruction and that classroom interaction and discussions take place in culturally mixed or ambiguous contexts. Teachers' culture pedagogy predominantly results from their own experience as language and culture learners. It primarily consists of exposing students to a variety of cultural input and engaging them in conversations to reveal their knowledge and appreciation of the foreign culture. Research findings further suggest that time-honored professional imperatives such as maximizing language production, and practices such as providing lexical equivalencies and personalizing questions, tend to keep culture learning at a surface level, and may interfere with the achievement of teachers' cultural goals. It is proposed that teachers hold incongruent theories of action of which they may not be aware.; On the basis of this work, a number of recommendations are made for bringing pre- and in-service teacher education up to par with the demands of their redefined task. These include (1) shifting the instructional focus from language structure to culture, (2) exploring teachers' implicit belief systems about culture, culture learning and teaching, (3) developing teachers' awareness and understanding of theories of culture and intercultural competence, and (4) defining specific culture learning objectives and the steps leading towards their attainment. |
