Teaching culture as a relational process through a multiliteracies-based global simulation

Recent scholarship in second and foreign language (FL) pedagogy has advocated for approaches to teaching culture that move beyond static notions of culture-as-fact, construed in terms of national traditions, towards relational approaches that foster strategies for interaction within discourse communities, where members embody and express a range of values and social and linguistic practices based on diverse identities and histories. However, such variations are often obscured in FL educational contexts by static or narrow conceptions of culture that pervade FL curricular materials, teacher-training programmes, and popular media discourses. This paper reports on outcomes from an innovative curriculum for fourth semester French in which culture was treated as a relational process through combination of a global simulation (GS) and a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. Students adopted the persona of a fictitious character for an entire semester and were socialised into second language/culture