Foreign Language in a Dialogue and Monologue with Culture

Revision with unchanged content. Teachers and researches of language have dedicated years of work to unders­tanding the relationship between language and culture. This book is yet another contribution to this endevour. It represents an ethnographic account of how students of a large public American university in the Midwest learned Russian language and culture. The findings are presented in the light of the theoretical framework based on Bakhtinian understanding of dialogue and monologue in culture and Vygotskian understanding of practice, offering an interpretation of language learning as a unique individual practice, and culture as a multidimensional phenomenon co-constructed in a dialogue, but a dialogue often constrained by the monologic genres of human interaction. Its goals is to help teachers think of new ways of creatively weaving cultural knowledge into their unique pedagogies and to introduce an international research community to a new piece of data and theory driven evidence of how languge and culture are connected.