Teaching Romanian culture to foreign learners: an experiment involving students’ understanding of visual arts

Foreign language teaching should aim to raise learners’ cultural awareness and improve their communicative skills, not just introduce linguistic structures. The question that arises is how to foster cultural competence in the foreign language classroom. This paper focuses on teaching Romanian to foreign students and presents the results of an experiment conducted with foreign student groups at the University of Bucharest and the “Ovidius” University of Constanța. The aim was to assess students’ interest in high culture, more precisely, the visual arts. The experiment consisted of the presentation of three paintings by famous Romanian artists, after which the students were asked to describe and comment on the images. The framework employed is based on the analysis of appraisal in the English language, proposed by Martin and White (2005). The results show that students easily recognized the main messages conveyed by the paintings. Furthermore, they evaluated the pictures based on their background knowledge, expressed detailed opinions and feelings about them, and made associations with their native cultures. These results suggest that foreign learners may be interested in high culture topics as long as they are actively involved in the learning process.