Project-Oriented Use of the World Wide Web for Teaching and Learning Culture

Abstract

This article reports on project-oriented use of the World Wide Web in an elective unit on French and francophone cultures at first-year university level. Data gathered over two years of teaching this unit are analysed qualitatively in order to determine how the learning of culture through project work, using the Web as the primary medium for research and presentation, differed from the learning that takes place in more traditional classroom settings. The article addresses three specific research questions relating to the authenticity of contact with the target culture, the questioning of stereotypes and critical reflection on the Web as a medium. For the purposes of validation and illustration, findings from the two French classes are linked to a larger data set, based on the project-oriented work in other second language classes (Chinese, German, Indonesian, Japanese and Russian). The data set was compiled over the years 1998–99 at the University of Melbourne in the context of a large-scale project of pedagogical innovation (see Debski, this volume).

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