An examination of two methods of teaching culture and a comparison of their effects on ethnocentrism among college students of German

Second language teaching has long been recognized as offering several benefits to second language learners. Some of the more recently claimed benefits have emphasized cross-cultural awareness, open mindedness to promote understanding, a liberation of the mind, the end of the melting pot mentality, and an appreciation of foreign cultures.These benefits have become cliches for many foreign language teachers and are, thus, often taken for granted. This has led to a paucity of quantitative research investigating these claims. This work summarizes one study which attempted to analyze various methods of decreasing ethnocentrism among first-semester German students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the spring semester of 1991.The study expanded upon the approach of Tuttle et al. (1979) in which it was found that ethnocentrism was more greatly reduced among groups in which cultural similarities between American and Spanish culture were emphasized than in groups emphasizing cultural differences. Many educators seem to have an "instinctive" belief in this finding, yet there had evidently been no previous studies of this claim performed at the college level.The study undertaken by the author did find differing changes in ethnocentrism depending upon the group to which subjects belonged. Although the differences among the three groups (one group emphasized cultural similarities, one emphasized cultural differences, the third served as a control group) were not statistically significant, they could serve as a point of departure for further studies which would seek to investigate this claim under alternative conditions.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio