MASS MEDIA AND THE TEACHING OF INTERNAL CULTURE IN SITUATION COMEDIES

With the turn of the century we have seen a string of political and cultural changes that have had a deep impact on economy and technology. As a result of that, we are living in what has been called “a global world”. This new world has opened the way to a global culture, which refers to the assimilation of cultures through the mass media, namely television, films and the Internet. However, we can see that cultural differences persist despite globalization.

As English language teachers, we are aware that language and culture are two indivisible entities, that is to say, cultural aspects are part of foreign language learning. In the seventies, Hall developed the iceberg analogy, identifying two aspects of culture: external and internal. The main problem the language learner faces is the present-day development of global culture, since this seemingly international behavior makes it difficult to identify the values that lay within a society’s internal culture. Given the complexity of this concept, we firmly believe that we must help our students identify more subjective cultural nuances that remain unnoticed or in the background, so we can break away from stereotypes. We suggest to do so with the help of television. Television is a window into the values of a society as well as an effective tool for language learning, both from the linguistic and cultural angle. Bearing all this in mind, we propose a pedagogical approach to carry out a cultural awareness exercise that enable the students to understand the values of the American society as portrayed in the situation comedy Friends, a highly acclaimed situation comedy within and outside the United States.