Learning Culture: Practicing Change. A Critical Approach to Learning and Teaching Culture in the EFL Classroom in Japan.

A university teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japan draws on teaching experience and a classroom experiment to discuss how a socio-historical analysis of culture can be combined with intercultural communication and global issues to supplement learning and teaching in the college-level EFL curriculum. Students were asked to make a list of five things about culture that they would like to know by the end of the semester. Participants in three teacher training workshops were asked a similar question about teaching. Results indicated students wanted answers to highly specific questions, whereas teachers had more general questions reflecting greater abstraction. This suggests a Vygotskian view of developmental changes in thinking processes and, in particular the theory of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Implications for ZPD in pedagogy and diagnosis of student developmental level are examined, and classroom techniques are discussed briefly. (Contains 40 references.) (MSE)