There are at least three important intellectual dimensions to transforming the foreign language classroom into a language and cultural studies laboratory:

First, students use the MOO to discuss German literary and cultural texts. The mediated form of communication in the MOO enables even intermediate students to discuss challenging texts at a more sophisticated level than is possible in traditional classroom settings.

Second, students explore the relationship between language and culture by creating their own foreign-language culture in the MOO. These creations become authentic parts of the classroom culture and raise the stakes of target-language use to the level of cultural production. By working in the target language, students experience first-hand that culture is neither neutral nor "naturally" available to members of a national culture but rather emerges through negotiations of various discourses that claim to represent aspects of reality. Ultimately, such assignments encourage students to test the linguistic and conceptual limits of their own culture as well as the foreign culture.

Finally, since all objects and rooms in the MOO can be visited by other users, students quickly realize that all their creative efforts are part of a new kind of "public sphere." This dimension of the MOO refashions the classroom into a community of learners and enables classroom practices to become a site for critical self-reflection.

Though an intermediate class usually expects students to become better "users" of a language, the content-based approach to learning in the MOO also asks students to become researchers of their target language and its culture. Indeed, this incarnation of cultural studies does not make language mastery a prerequisite but rather is intimately tied to the process of language learning itself. And since students experience making culture at the same time that they analyze it, this model of cultural studies offers more than cultural literacy. Ultimately, redesigning language courses as cultural studies holds the promise of anchoring foreign language departments back into the liberal arts curriculum by offering students the same kinds of intellectual challenges they seek in other introductory courses across the curriculum--whether they be in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.

For additional information on using the MOO for cultural studies at the intermediate level, see Jeffrey Schneider and Silke von der Emde. "Brave New (Virtual) World: Transforming Language Learning into Cultural Studies through Online Learning Environments (MOOs)." ADFL Bulletin, 32.1 (2000): 18-26.

[Updated: 12 February 2002]