Intercultural Humor

Youtube can provide videos of L2 comedy that can be the starting point for an intercultural class discussion about products, practices and perspectives.

I think comedy is a very important product of a culture. Most comedy relies on stereotypes; it uses exaggerated depiction of cultural practices and perspectives. The video I linked is a fake commercial within a comedy movie that promotes a "true" German restaurant by ridiculing other cuisines like Italian, Greek and Turkish. The joke here, however, is not on the ethnic minorities but on the narrow-minded, nationalistic Germans whose "Gastfreundlichkeit" (hospitality) does not apply for everything south of the border.

Instructors could use such instances of L2 comedy to foster intercultural discussion with NS. Why do Germans think this is funny? (If they think it is funny at all). Do American students consider this funny, too? What is the difference to American comedy which also heavily relies on ethnic stereotypes? I think such an intercultural understanding of humor is a major step in gaining pragmatic proficiency in the target language.

"You have ... friends" - My thoughts on social software.

My attitude towards social software like facebook is kind of ambivalent. I joined the German equivalent studivz a while ago and I kind of like discovering people that I haven't seen in a long time. I got some information about these people, what they are doing now etc., which I probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. The question for me, however, is: If I don't care to find out about them through personal contact, are they really that important to me anyway? And how accurate is the picture I get aboout them through this medium? When I think about my personal pages at those social sites, I usually keep the information I give about me as short as possible because I think it would represent a kind of distorted image of myself. After all there's always only a limited set of categories that you can fill out about yourself. So, as you can see, I'm more for face-to-face social interaction.

Mini-Project #2

Mini-Project #2:
My CMC activity is designed for beginning learners of German who should be able to give and ask for basic information about people, their personality, what they like to do and their family.
The project is intended to improve the students’ basic communicative competence through a fictional online roommate interview situation in a synchronous chat environment. Payne and Ross(2005) have shown that a synchronous CMC environment can not only be beneficial for development in writing, but the increased L2 output also has positive effects on oral communicative competence. A main reason for this increased L2 output is the positive attitude a SCMC environment creates among students as opposed to face-to-face classroom interaction. The project, then, is not only beneficial to the students’ abilities in writing and speaking German, but may also reduce their affective filter for future L2 communicative situations.
The activity is designed for one lesson in which the students will only communicate with themselves in pairs of two. Each student has to have a computer with a chat program (like MSN) installed.
To activate a meaningful schema, the teacher will tell the students at the beginning of class that they are in a one-to-one chat situation with a possible roommate for their apartment. This is a situation the students might well encounter in real-life when planning to study abroad and looking for suitable housing opportunities in Germany.
Before chatting, the class can brainstorm/ collect questions they would ask a roommate in this situation together. The teacher has to make clear that they should address several topics. (Personality, hobbies, family background).
Each student is assigned an anonymous mail-account or screen-name that the teacher will give them on a flashcard together with the name of the student they have to invite to a chatroom. The anonymous name makes sure that they have to find out via chat with whom they are communicating. (Students might also prefer not to use their real instant messenger accounts for privacy. MSN, the microsoft instant messenger, allows for an easy setup of chat accounts with email addresses.) During the chat, they are only allowed to use L2.
After the chat the students are supposed to submit a chat protocol to the teacher.
As a follow up, each pair will share their results with the class, that is each student introduces to class what he/she has found out about the partner. In order to give the other students a reason to listen, the class can then decide if the two would get along living together. To make the evaluation of that follow-up easier, the teacher should record (video or audio) the student’s presentations to compare them with the chat protocols later.
The final evaluation is based on four equally weighed criteria; Contribution, Content, Style and Follow Up. Here is a link to my grading rubric.

Playing with the Blog

1. Just to show how to implement audio files in blogger:

It doesn't make any sense and I hate the sound of my voice!

2. Here's a link to a word document. It's a paper I had to write for a German class.
Paper.

Last FM

The social network I want to introduce is last.fm - the social music revolution. It is a web based network like facebook but it also comes along with a software you have to download and install after you created a profile. The main purpose of the software is to "scrobble" your music, which means that it recognizes the songs you are listening to on your computer and sends this information to your last.fm profile. According to your personal track list, last.fm gives you recommendations and shows you "neighbors", that is people who share the same music taste with you.
The software also allows you to tag the songs you are listening to and the site contains a music search function that is based on those tags.My favorite function of the software, however, is the radio. You can just type in a tag and then the radio randomly plays music that is associated with the tag. You can also just listen to the personal radio which means that last.fm automatically plays songs that, according to your music profile, should be your taste. From my experience, this works really well.
With regards to teaching, it might be a source for authentic material (i.e. target language music). The only problem is that you cannot download the music from last.fm.