Being intercultural through text : a case study of using a cultuurtekst-approach as a conceptualisation of language and culture teaching

• Main Author: Quist, Gerdi
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2011
• Subjects: 371.3
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.536507

This thesis is an account of a qualitative study which explores language and culture teaching through the notion of 'cultuurtekst', a concept coined by the Dutch literary theorist Maaike Meijer, as an approach to using text to develop learners into critical intercultural language users as part of the general language classroom in Dutch as a Foreign Language pedagogy. The study is located in the context of a fourth year language class at a traditional university as part of a degree programme studying Dutch as a single subject or as a combined honours subject. Using a variety of qualitative research methods, this study borrows from the principles of action research, ethnography and grounded theory to explore how the students in this class engaged with this pedagogy by analysing the transcripts of two lessons and two sets of student interviews. I seek to contribute to the development of an intellectual and critical approach to language and culture education beyond skills based instrumental approaches. In doing so I build on Kramsch's (1993) and Byram's (cf 1994, 1997) work in intercultural communication in language teaching and draw on Foucault's notion of discourse, Malinowski's notion of context of situation and context of culture and Kress's notion of conflicting discourses in text to outline the 'cultuurtekst' pedagogy. Applying views of intercultural communication (cf Blommaert, 1998) to the notion of 'cultuurtekst', this study explores whether a 'cultuurtekst' pedagogy can contribute towards developing students' critical intercultural awareness by encouraging them to consider the cultural influences in texts and the complexity of these as signified through multiple discourses.