Learning About Other Cultures

Learning a foreign language is a daunting task. Not only do students have to learn dozens of new words and sentence structures, they also have to learn about another culture. A reading selection about "A Day at Home" in a Norwegian textbook, for example, will describe completely different activities from a textbook on Swahili.

An Israeli researcher suspected that students might have an easier time if they did not have to learn both subjects at once (Abu-Rubia,1996). Abu-Rubia looked at two groups of Israeli high-school students: Jewish Hebrew speakers learning Arabic, and Arabs learning Hebrew. Students read two different stories in the foreign language they were learning, one about their own culture, and the other about the culture they were studying. Both the Jewish and Arab students had much higher reading comprehension scores when they read about their own culture than the foreign culture, even though both stories were written in a foreign language. When the passages described things that were already familiar, the students did not have to learn two topics at once, and could focus on understanding the language.