Foreign Language in a Dialogue and Monologue with Culture- A Case Study of one Foreign Language Classroom from Bakhtinian and Vygotskian Perspectives

Teachers and researches of language have dedicated years of work to understandingthe relationship between language and culture. This book is yetanother contribution to this endevour. It represents an ethnographic accountof how students of a large public American university in the Midwest learnedRussian language and culture. The findings are presented in the light of thetheoretical framework based on Bakhtinian understanding of dialogue andmonologue in culture and Vygotskian understanding of practice offering aninterpretation of language learning as a unique individual practice andculture as a multidimensional phenomenon co-constructed in a dialogue buta dialogue often constrained by the monologic genres of human interaction.Its goals is to help teachers think of new ways of creatively weaving culturalknowledge into their unique pedagogies and to introduce an internationalresearch community to a new piece of data and theory driven evidence ofhow languge and culture are connected.