Teaching Culture in a Purposefully Communicative Manner

This is part of a series on purposeful communication.

This past summer, I had the wonderful experience of observing Skip Crosby teach a middle school Spanish language lab at the CI Summit in Philadelphia. I ALWAYS enjoy observing Skip, because he is a master CI/ADI teacher with middle school students, plus I know little-to-no Spanish, so I love how he makes the language comprehensible. However, more importantly, I got to see Skip present a cultural lesson on vitilla (a sport in the Dominican Republic which is similar to baseball to a degree) in the Spanish language - what I loved most about it (other than just learning about this sport which I had never heard about before, its cultural connection to life in the Dominican Republic, and its possible correlation to why the Dominican Republic has the second largest representation of players in the MLB after America) was that although it was presented in Spanish (and I know very little Spanish), it was 100% comprehensible to me!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about my purposeful communicative goals for the school year. This goal was based on Bill Van Patten's definition of communication - here is my explanation of it from that earlier blog post:

"Communication is the interpretation, expression, and/or negotiation of meaning for a purpose, in a given context." Based on that definition, Van Patten continues that our purpose should be that we wish to discover and learn information about each other, ourselves, and the world around us through communication, text, and input. In addition, in his book Van Patten adds that another purpose of communication is to entertain: "When we tell a joke or write a story...our purpose is to entertain in some way."

In that same blog post where I listed ways in which I aim to embrace this in my classroom, I wrote: [here is how I will use purposeful communication] "to learn about the world around us: 

1. teaching cultural topics and other content in understandable target language through readings and presentations."

Therefore, as part of my effort to engage in more purposeful communication, I have indeed begun to teach cultural topics in understandable Latin.

HOWEVER, this is NOT as easy as it sounds though: Teaching a target-language-based presentation is still INPUT, and crafting a cultural presentation in the target language means that it still has to be 98%-100% comprehensible. So often, culture has very specific non-high-frequency words, which means that while I can gloss those particular cultural vocabulary words in the presentation, the remaining words must be known/acquired words and cognates. If there are more glossed words than actual known/acquired words, then the input is not comprehensible and can become overwhelming for students.

My goal for the actual presentation was just student understanding and demonstration of comprehension in English - VERY low level on Bloom's Taxonomy. If I were to want to have a further discussion or application in L2, that would require much more specialized output - I just wanted students to show me in L1 their understanding of that L2 communication. Because my goal was comprehension and understanding, to ask questions in L2 and for them to respond in L2 would not let me know what they initially understood.

In my Latin 2 Honors classes, we are starting Andrew Olimpi's novella Clodia. The first chapter takes place at a Roman dinner party, so I decided to do a short presentation about the Roman cena in Latin. There are a lot of cultural nuances surrounding the cena embedded in that chapter which one will not catch without this knowledge. First off, the Roman cena can be a BIG topic in English, and if my goal is being 98%-100% comprehensible in Latin, I big time needed to "shelter vocabulary" and create lots of exposure of cognates/known words to balance out any glossed words. Below is what I crafted (this is part 1 - the cena is a BIG topic):

NOTE - I know that recumbebant is the better word to use than reclinabant, but my goal was to be comprehensible, so I used the cognate instead.

I presented the above using Google Slides and had students answer the following questions in English during the presentation:

1. Explain the dining seating arrangement in a Roman cena and how it differs from a traditional Western meal seating.
2. Nine people could recline on couches in a Roman cena. Explain what happens if there were more than nine.
3. Explain how social rank could affect one’s seating and food offerings.
4. The triclinium was the most decorated room in a Roman house - explain what different things a Roman could see when dining in the triclinium.

Observations

1. I really like the idea of presenting cultural topics in Latin - this is a great example of purposeful communication! However, the key is that the presentation/reading must be 98%-100% comprehensible. I know that Oerberg presents cultural topics in Latin in his chapters, but many times, those readings are overly vocabulary-intensive and turns into a frustrating decoding activity.
2. If I want to get meaty with cultural topics, then I will have to use L1 for that due to complexity of language needed.
3. I am still learning how to teach culture in a purposeful communicative way, but I was very pleased with what I wrote. Again, my goal was to deliver a cultural topic in L2 using 98%-100% comprehensible language where students at the end could demonstrate understanding and comprehension of that L2 in English.
4. I did spend the next day having students interact with the presentation as a reading with some post-reading activities, but that was it. It was not necessary to spend more than a day on it as a reading, since the reading was quite comprehensible to them already.

I am going to continue to do this! My next cultural presentation will be on the Roman popina - wish me luck!

P.S. In the second week of school, I did a comprehensible Latin version of Skip's vitilla presentation, since the first week we had focused on PQAs involving sports. I do not know if my other Latin 2 colleagues understood why I did it or what vitilla had to do with Latin, but I LOVED that I was teaching students about the modern world IN THE LATIN LANGUAGE!