In the latest instalment in the Technology in Modern Foreign Languages series, Clare Seccombe writes about how she uses the internet in the classroom as a window onto the world in order to better illustrate the culture of the countries whose languages students are learning.

I’m sure that quite a few of my students over the years have thought that French and Spanish are languages that I have made up deliberately to confuse and bewilder them. Their immediate reaction to the hard work and thinking involved in the subject is often “Everyone should speak English”, “France is stupid” or “I’m never going to Spain”. I’ve needed to have in my repertoire something else to tempt them with, something else that will help them to have a deeper understanding of what the languages they are studying are all about.

Community cohesion is one of the big things at the moment, and the Global Dimension is now an integral part of the KS3 curriculum. As teachers of MFL we are ideally placed to address these issues; we are fortunate to be teaching a subject where different cultures and ways of life are the essence of our work. We deal with other countries on a daily basis. By bringing aspects of culture into our lessons we not only enrich and enliven them, but we also enable our students to see and understand that their culture and way of life are not the only ones and are not necessarily the right ones. It is imperative that students understand that foreign is not synonymous with wrong or bad.

We are very fortunate in 2010 that we have the KS2 Framework with its Intercultural Understanding strand, of which I am a big fan, and the new KS3 Framework , which also has an Intercultural Understanding strand, to point us in the right direction. It is also the year when we have the World Cup in South Africa to facilitate work of an intercultural nature, not to mention the Winter Olympics in Vancouver and ongoing preparations for London 2012.

When I started along the road of international education in 1997, the internet was really still in its infancy. There was some information out there, but it was hard to find, and then we did not have the facility to view it in the classroom. No interactive whiteboards, no computer suites. And, if one ICT class was using the internet in those days, it became intolerably slow for everyone else. So the cultural input relied on the FLAs, photographs that I had taken on holiday, brochures, magazines, and of course the huge piles of realia which I collected while abroad and which are the scourge of the spouses of MFL teachers everywhere.

Bringing the world into your classroom these days is so easy, thanks to technology. If you’re studying weather, bring it alive by looking at some webcams.  If you’re teaching “school”, have a look at the websites of some schools in one of the countries where the language is spoken. For example, have a look at the subjects that the students at this Spanish school learn. Do your students know all the vocabulary ? What is Euskara?

If it’s French you’re doing, you could show them pictures of schools in France, but Martinique is much more interesting! There are some superb video clips available now. These clips from Senegal are especially useful for topics such as food and daily routine. There are also countless video clips, audio recordings and photographs which are readily available to MFL teachers via the internet, not to mention the numerous websites themselves with which it is easy to supplement the driest text book.

The internet is omnipresent in the lives of today’s young people. They are able to access all kinds of things, things which will help them to form their opinions. Some of these things will touch on other cultures, on other peoples, and the opinions that they begin to form may not be those of tolerance, understanding and interest that we would hope for. Cultural stereotypes are everywhere in their lives: in the toys that they play with (just check out the French guy in Gorseville!), the books that they read, the television programmes that they watch and the music that they listen to. What we need to do is to try to prod them in the right direction, to show them the difference between stereotype and reality.

Again, technology comes to our rescue and enables us to do this with ease. I love showing this video clip from YouTube, which gives us some stereotypical views of France and the French. We all have a good laugh at it. Then I show this one, the English equivalent. We know that this is not an accurate depiction of England and being English, so we have to ask how accurate the French one is.

Modern technology allows us easy, quick and, most importantly, free access to materials which will help us in our endeavours to increase our students’ tolerance and understanding of other countries and cultures. But nothing will achieve that aim more than personal contact between our students and their counterparts overseas. In “the olden days” of the late 1990s, all we could manage was hand-written letters, some cassette recordings of students speaking, and, if we were really lucky, some videos that we had made using a camera the size of a small suitcase. And of course it all had to be sent via snail mail or faxed.

While we can still not underestimate the impact of a personal letter arriving in the post, there are so many other ways to correspond and work collaboratively now. There is etwinning, where schools can find European partners and then work and correspond with them within a secure environment. And the correspondence is almost instant – no waiting three weeks for replies to letters to arrive – thus maintaining the impetus and interest.

Audio and video recordings, which are so much easier to make these days, can be shared via email, or on shared spaces such as wikis and blogs, as well as the more traditional methods. And there are the numerous online authoring tools which are well-documented in Box of Tricks and which can be used to great effect in communication with partner schools and friends in other countries.

So the ball is in our court. We have the ways and the means. Let’s use technology to ensure that our students really understand culture.

Clare Seccombe

Photo by chicaurbana

This post is tagged internet resources, mfltech