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using voice actors from the local country. Military services and other large
organizations have their own distinctive subcultures with specialized terminology and
writing style, which we try to respect where possible. The extent to which a particular
course needs to be adapted to the local culture typically depends upon the size of the
country. For example, the German and British versions required extensive adaptation
for the local culture, while most smaller NATO countries are willing to use more
generic courses.
To date we have developed courses with cultural instruction and extensive
language instruction for the following countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia,
French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa, and the United States. The United States
courses include a course on the majority language (goEnglish), as well as a pilot
course in a Native American language (Cherokee). More culture-focused courses
have been developed for the countries of the Horn of Africa, and additional courses
are being developed for Northern Africa and other countries.
4 Course Structure and Development Methodology
Cultural knowledge potentially encompasses a broad range of topics, such as social
structure, material culture, economics, political structure, art, as well as the culture of
day-to-day life. It is difficult to cover all these topics in enough depth that learners
can competently and effectively apply the cultural knowledge they gain. We employ a
course development methodology that enables us to identify which types of situations
are most important, and what cultural skills are needed to master those situations. We
then design the courses to help learners develop and master those skills. This offers
practical benefits for learners, because it gives them cultural competencies that they
can immediately put to use when interacting with people from the other culture. It
helps learners develop confidence in their ability to engage in intercultural interaction.
Once learners start becoming effective in interacting with people from the other
culture, they will learn more about the culture from those interactions, and are likely
to continue to broaden and deepen their cultural knowledge on their own.
This course development methodology, called the Situated Culture Methodology
(SCM) [3], [15], works as follows and is illustrated in Fig. 3. The first step, outlined
in the top left corner of the figure, is to determine scope of the course. This takes into
account the situational contexts in which learners are likely to employ their cultural
skills. First, it is necessary to identify the intended scope of the course, in terms of the
breadth of the geographic region being covered and the duration of the course. To
further focus the course, we work with cultural subject matter experts to identify the
particular jobs and missions that learners will likely want to train for. This process
identifies typical scenarios that require intercultural skills, situations that learners
might encounter during those scenarios, and tasks that learners might need to perform
in those situations. Given these situations and tasks, it is then possible to identify
specific
situated culture learning objectives
: knowledge and skills that learners need
to acquire in order to be effective in those situations. If the learners must employ the
local language in these situations, then a set of situated language learning objectives
are implied as well.
