A Tele-Collaborative Course on French-American Intercultural Communication

THIS ARTICLE REPORTS on an approach to teaching French-American communication that supports learners' adoption of an intercultural stance, what Kramsch has termed a "third place" (231). From the perspective of the third place, learners look critically at their own culture as well as the culture that is the focus of classroom study. Access to people who are members of the group under study is a crucial feature of our approach, and this access is facilitated by the availability of telecommunications technology, especially teleconferencing. We relate an experience of pairing classes across the Atlantic in order to collaborate on a series of parallel tasks and texts designed to place aspects of French and American culture in telling juxtaposition. While each class carries out the tasks on its own, according to its own needs, timetable and requirements, discussions via teleconferencing add a realistic dynamism to the process of interpretation for both classes. Without the interactive settings made possible by teleconferencing, this work would be considerably less practical and cost-effective; however, the fundamental rationale for our classroom design is not the availability of technical tools. Instead, this approach traces its philosophical roots to an underlying view of language as culture. Despite the inclusive breadth of commonly invoked theoretical constructs,' modern language teaching continues to struggle in coming to terms with the sociocultural dimensions of language learning and use. The overwhelming preference is for a model that views grammatical competence as the essential feature of language ability.2 A further obstacle in coming to terms with "culture" is the preeminence of pragmatic, utilitarian thinking among language professionals and the public.3 Due to pressure to produce quantifiable results, notions of culture are shoehorned into the utilitarian mold; language ability becomes, for example, a set of observable functions, or a list of practical speech acts. In light of the limited view of culture that currently prevails, Kramsch