Compartmentalizing culture teaching strategies under an emotioncy-based model

Abstract

     Given the significant role of culture in communication, language researchers, among many other educationalists, have endeavored to develop strategies and techniques for teaching culture in foreign/second languages. The abundance of these strategies, nevertheless, does not seem to realize its full potential due to being a fragmented rather than coherent whole. In the current study, we reviewed the relevant literature to find common grounds in culture instruction strategies and, accordingly, embarked upon introducing a framework to unify and categorize strategies used in teaching culture with respect to the emotions they provoke in learners. Building upon the prominent role of emotions in various domains of language teaching and learning, it was assumed that the emotions generated in the classroom may play an important role in culture learning as well. To this end, we employed the recently-developed hierarchical model of emotioncy as the underlying basis for our framework aiming at offering a hierarchy of teaching culture. Consequently, a number of classroom activities were suggested as ways to make better use of learners' emotions.