Giving a virtual voice to the silent language of culture: The Cultura project

This paper presents a Web-based, cross-cultural, curricular initiative entitled Cultura, designed to develop foreign language students' understanding of foreign cultural attitudes, concepts, beliefs, and ways of interacting and looking at the world.Our focus will be on the pedagogy of electronic media, with particular emphasis on the ways in which the Web can be used to reveal those invisible aspects of a foreign culture, thereby giving a voice to the elusive "silent language" 1 and empowering students to construct their own approach to crosscultural literacy.We examine these new areas of cultural knowledge which the Web now renders accessible and attempt to redefine the meaning of foreign language "teaching" in the new world of networked communication.This article is written by four of the instructors who have been using Cultura in their classes, two of them teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and two at the Institut National des Télécommunications in Evry, France (one has since changed universities).This "four-voiced" approach serves to illustrate the multi-faceted aspects of the project and the different types of readings to which Cultura lends itself, and explains the shifts in perspective the reader will encounter.Cultura was first developed in the summer of 1997.Since then we have continued to experiment with and develop it, using it in university level courses.Last year, it was used experimentally at the secondary school level as well.This particular paper focuses mostly on the work done during the spring and fall semesters of 1999 between MIT and INT.