Spanish-American Cultura: Analysing Students’ Evolving Perceptions in Intercultural Exchange

1. Spanish-American Cultura: Analysing Students’ Evolving Perceptions in Intercultural Exchange Robert O’Dowd University of León Jesús Suárez Barnard College, New York

3. The Original Cultura Model • On-line: Student questionnaires and authentic materials from C1 and C2 • Classwork: Analysis of materials • On-line: Discussion of theories and findings between students in both classes • Classwork: Essays and Presentations based on investigations

5. Spanish-American Cultura:Combining On-line and Contact Phases • January-March: On-line Exchange (1) • March: Group from New York visit León • April: Group from León visit New York • April: New Materials collected/created by students are added to on-line platform • April-May: On-line Exchange (2). Analysis of new materials

6. Activities during Visits • Home-stays • Class presentations made to various classes of learners • Ethnographic Interviews • Organised tours and visits with entire class

7. Feeding back to the on-line Platform • Favourite photos and their commentaries • Videos of presentations • Essays based on ethnographic interviews

8. Areas of On-going Action Research • Didactic: Do the on-line activities over-emphasise difference and encourage over-generalisation? • Linguistic: Do the forums support vocabulary acquisition and use?

9. Reflecting on the aims of on-line intercultural exchanges • The original Cultura project: • “It offers learners…a unique comparative, cross-cultural approach for gradually constructing knowledge of other values, attitudes, and beliefs, in an ever-widening approach to understanding the foreign culture.” • “…the side-by-side viewing of similar items from two different cultures (e.g., a newspaper ad…) allows an observer to instantly see similarities and variations which…are usually hard to notice.” • http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num1/furstenberg/default.html

10. But does the on-line exchange lead to an over-emphasis on difference? • An American student following the visit to León: • “Before the exchange, I had associated the Spanish students with their writing on the on-line forums and I had an image of Spain as being very different from the USA and as being very exotic. However, during the visit to León I realised that the Spanish students are very practical, fun and, most importantly, very like ourselves. Just like American students, they do fun things, they wear clothes the same as ours and they have many similar ideas to ours about topics such as family, friends, religion and the government.

11. The constant search for difference? • A Spanish student writes: • “The exchange became boring at the end because we were writing over and over again ‘we say less please and thank you than you do’ during a whole semester and this is not really enriching. There should be more varieties in the activities…”

12. The danger of over-generalising on-line? • An American student writes on-line: • I also worry about our making generalizations about "Spain" and "Spaniards" based on the responses of a few students. Take the business of cutting in line -- does the fact that a lot of people said they would speak up really tell us anything about Spanish or American culture? Or do we just happen to have a group of people here who are either particularly gutsy or particularly conscious of injustice?

13. Consequences of over-generalising on-line? • Another American student writes on-line before her visit: • In the articles we read about Spain, it seemed that the acts which are considered polite in America, saying "please" and "thank you" all the time, for example, are looked at as somewhat rude in Spain, because people generally do not use these courtesies as often in everyday conversation. Is this true? I am coming to visit Spain next week, and after reading all of these articles I am so worried about offending people by acting the way I do everyday in America without thinking about it!

14. How can the stay-abroad element counter-act the emphasis on difference and over-generalisation? • Differences in travel /non-travel group essays: Non-travel groups were ‘forced’ to deal with the chosen themes on the platform (religion etc.). The travel group found their own topics of interest and focussed on them… • Travel group carried out other activities – ethnographic interviews, cultural observation – which do not necessarily emphasise difference and which allow for exceptions

15. Concordance analysis of lexical use in Cultura forums • The on-line exchanges that take place in Cultura forums, although not directed by the teacher/professor, provide a favorable setting to read and to use new vocabulary, particularly vocabulary related to the topics, and not only the usual more general vocabulary: ‘yo creo’, ‘en mi opinión’, etc. • In the forums of Cultura the students use a good deal of topic-related vocabulary, some of it new and low frequency vocabulary. • The analysis of the corpora shows that this vocabulary is used in the vast majority of the cases correctly/appropriately.