The teaching of culture begins with a complex definition of the concept of culture. Somehow everything that a group of people do, make, or believe; but somehow not.
In my own teaching, I often avoid explicitly "teaching" culture. As an undergrad, I studied Sociology, and often got tangled up in the idiosyncratic aspects of culture. How representative of a culture is any one person? Anyway, this isn't the venue for that discussion. In ESL, pragmatics and cultural expectations seem important. The concept of what is negotiable is familiar to PIE teachers, as our Saudi students often want to negotiate things that, in typical American interactions, would be non-negotiable. I think these lessons are hard because they aren't necessarily only linguistic. They involve understanding what your interlocutor expects, and knowing how to show respect for that person.
I think that technology offers several useful ways to teach culture through collaboration and exchange. CMC speeds up the process of interacting with what would've been pen pals generations ago. The tricky part of teaching culture is finding out what is culture. Whose culture? The activity that Alan, Karen and I made was about food in Phoenix. Students' explorations of the menus and the resulting inferences about culture suggest that they are "learning" Phoenix food culture.
Clearly, culture is something that we ought to teach students, or at least provide avenues for discovery. The how, and the WHAT remain lingering questions for me. I'll have to keep thinking about this.
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