Target Culture Teaching or Not? Finding Critical Linguacultural Otherness in the Third Space

• In Event: Teaching Us: Understanding Diverse Institutional Contexts and Otherness

Abstract

Though intercultural communication is at the heart of language teaching, little is known of the pedagogical stages to establish the “Third Space” to cultivate learners’ intercultural communicative competence, enacting students’ critical linguacultural otherness identity. Few studies focus on how Chinese language teachers mediate cultural meaning-making to garner students’ understanding of culture relativism. Situated within a tertiary-level English classroom in North China, this article explores how teachers employ pedagogical stages and humanized pedagogy to decenter the cultural imperialism, and how students relativize their own values and behaviors to that of the target language culture forming a compound cultural identity gradually. The findings expand the existing scholarship highlighting the significance to enact students’ critical linguacultural otherness stance in the third space.

Author

• Fang Gao, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University
  Presenting Author