Incorporating Culture in the German Language Classroom

In this paper, I briefly describe my experiences teaching German culture in target language courses over two years with the aid of digital technology at a Japanese university. I knew that teaching the target culture can motivate students to improve their skills in the target language but factors such as time constraints, a lack of available resources, and a reluctance to overly depend on my own cultural experiences kept me from including culture as a regular lesson component to the same degree as I did with other language skills. During the Covid-19 pandemic and the move to online instruction, however, I became more comfortable using digital technology, which made me reassess the teaching of German culture in my language courses.