TEACHING CULTURE IN ARABIC: PERSPECTIVES ON THE USE OF BLENDED LEARNING AND HYPERMEDIA

Abstract

In contemporary foreign language pedagogy, effective teaching of intercultural communicative competence cannot be separated from the use of technology. Web 2.0, social media, mobile devices, online and blended learning, and wearing technology have made it nearly impossible to develop effective courses without basing them on the culture of the target language. Teaching culture, however, is not salient in foreign language teaching; it is the most neglected part (Sercu, 2005) and culture has to defend its legitimacy to be integrated in teaching languages, just as Kramsch (1995) put it “…culture, in order to be legitimate, has always had to justify itself” (p. 85). As a result, teachers devote around 20% of their teaching time to teaching culture (Castro, Sercu & García, 2004). In recent years, nevertheless, there has been a shift in understanding, implementing and integrating teaching culture in foreign language settings (Bayyurt, 2006, Chamberlin-Quinlisk, 2012; Gonen & Aglam, 2012; Castro, et. al., 2004; Byram, 2002), but at a slow pace (Castro et al., 2004; Sercu, García, & Castro, 2005) The situation of teaching culture using technology in Arabic as a foreign language is not as advanced as for other foreign languages and the attempts to remedy the problems are limited. Although interest in learning Arabic has noticeably increased in the last twenty years, educational institutions are far from ready to absorb the new enrollments. The two main areas that have received little attention in research are the integration of culture and the integration of technology in the Arabic teaching context. This is in evidence in the lack of well-prepared teachers, the scarcity of Web tools that specifically address the particularities of the Arabic language, and the shortage of well-designed and innovative teaching materials and assessment tools. 13 In an effort to fill the gap in the research and in order to better understand teachers’ and learners’ views about the integration of culture using technology in foreign language, in general, and in the Arabic context, in particular, this dissertation used three interrelated studies to investigate the following three areas: (1) Teaching culture in Arabic: Teachers’ and learners perspectives; (2) Teaching culture in Arabic: learners’ perspectives surrounding the use of blended learning setting; and (3) Teaching culture in Arabic: Learners’ affect surrounding the use of Arabic Hypermedia as part of the blended Levantine Arabic class. The results of the three studies showed that the teachers and the learners understand the important role that culture plays, but statistically significant differences exist between teachers’ and learners’ views of the activities practiced in the classroom and the distribution of language and culture teaching and learning times. The results also show that learners had positive feelings and were highly satisfied with the blended setting and the Arabic Hypermedia tool and lessons. The learners, however, faced some challenges in learning about culture using technology. Finally, in a call for teaching language as culture using technology, the dissertation suggests practical pedagogical implications for teaching foreign language and Arabic language