Teachers play a central role in shaping subject content knowledge for teaching culture in foreign language classroom teaching practice. This presentation aims to discuss two findings on teachers’ mediation between their conceptions of culture and its classroom teaching practice, drawing from a case study of three Japanese language teachers.
The goal of foreign language learning is described now as a complex, ongoing process for each individual language learner of sociocultural and dialogic mediation between new conceptual knowledge and existing knowledge. It is often described by the terms ‘mediation’ and ‘meaning-making’. As such, the contemporary theoretical discussions on the teaching of culture in foreign language teaching have come to pay more attention to each individual and personal trajectory of change in views, ways of seeing and thinking, and state of mind towards the target language and culture and that of their own. Languages teachers play a central role in shaping subject content knowledge for the teaching of culture, however, little is known about what ‘culture’ really is as subject content knowledge and how culture is taught in the local classroom teaching practices. This presentation draws upon a case study of three Japanese language teachers and their Japanese language classrooms in South Australia that examines how Japanese language teachers conceptualise culture and enact it as their teaching practice. Data were gathered over a period of eight months and included classroom observation, video-recording of classroom lessons, stimulated-recall interviews, and a review of teaching materials. The data were analysed thematically. The study found that teachers’ work on teaching culture in their Japanese language classrooms can be best described through three interrelated facets: ‘culture as personal’, ‘culture as pedagogic’, and ‘culture as enactment in creating classroom learning’ and be identified their social and dialogic mediation. The study also found that teachers’ conceptions and their enactments in the language classroom are not always aligned. The presentation concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings, in particular, the need to attend to teachers’ conceptions and ongoing reflection on the role of culture in language teaching and learning.
