Culture as information and culture as affective process: A comparative study

Abstract

This paper describes an application of the Cross-Cultural Adaptability Inventory or CCAI (Kelley and Meyers 1995a) to measure the effects of two ways to teach about German culture in beginning language courses. A first language (L1) process-oriented approach and a second language (L2) knowledge-based approach were implemented in separate classes. Students filled out the CCAI in pretreatment and post-treatment conditions. Quantitative analyses of results established that the treatment group, taught with constructivist, process-oriented tasks as articulated in the National Standards (1996), experienced significantly positive results on the CCAI composite score and on two out of four subscales that assess cultural sensibilities. Conversely, the control group, which spent commensurate time working with knowledge-based orientations characteristic of many textbooks on the market today, experienced a nonsignificant decrease in cultural receptivity in those same CCAI measures.