Culture in Language Teaching

Culture in Language Teaching

1. CULTURE: AN INTEGRAL COMPONENT OF LANGUAGE TEACHING

   • The concept of culture
     • used to be seen as the literate or humanities component of language study
     • has become in many respects politicized and embroiled in the controversies
     • associated with the politics of ethnic identity, religious affiliation and moral values.

2. THE CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF LANGUAGE STUDY

   • depending on one’s disciplinary and political orientation, and on whose interests are being served
     • the modernist perspective
       • culture’ is associated with the context in which the language is lived and spoken by its native speakers
       • Culture is seen either as a humanistic or as a sociolinguistic concept, with the concept of the intercultural, that characterizes the contact between people from different cultures
         • A humanistic concept
           • culture is acquired in school
           • it is synonymous with a general knowledge of literature and the arts.
           • study of literature is a reminder that language study was originally subservient to the interests of philologists and literary scholars.
           • In the 1980s, with the advent of communicative language teaching, the humanistic concept of culture gave way to a more pragmatic concept of culture as way of life
         • A sociolinguistic concept
           • It includes the native speakers’ ways of behaving, eating, talking, dwelling, their customs, their beliefs and values.
           • deeply interested in cross-cultural pragmatics and the sociolinguistic appropriateness of language use
             • they taught rules of grammatical usage, through modeling and role-playing.
           • sometimes teaching culture has meant teaching only the typical and the most salient stereotypical, behaviors, foods, celebrations and customs
           • culture takes on various forms depending on whether the language taught
             • foreign language: mostly of the practical,
             • second language: exposure to debates and issues of relevance to native speakers,
             • heritage language: who wish to connect with their ancestral roots.
       • The Post-Modernist Perspective
         • Culture in the teaching of English has therefore been resignified as a post-modernist concept referring to Discourse, identity and power
           • Culture as Discourse
             • Discourses, as identity kits, are inherently ideological, in the sense that they lead people to put forward certain ideas and values at the expense of others.
           • Culture as identity
             • Language (learning and teaching) and culture are mutually implicated, but that ‘culture is multiple and complex’
               • Each person is seen as the intersection of an infinite number of partially overlapping cultures
           • Culture as the moral right to be heard and listened to
             • understands cultures to be in principle of equal worth, but in fact they are objects of moral and ideological struggle.
               • For example
                 • the current debate about the wearing of the Muslim scarf in French schools.
                   • French educational system needs to maintain separed church and state but preserving the right of each individual to his/her own culture.
                   • the need to teach culture confronts the language teacher with a political dilemma, namely, how to teach cultural and moral difference without ignoring the incommensurable and even conflictual aspects of that difference.
     • Intercultural education
       • language learning that is less focused on approximating a native speaker linguistic or pragmatic norm than it is based on the subjective experience of the language learner engaged
         • Some of them disagree and say
           • language teachers should teach non-native speakers how to recognize and adopt the discursive behavior of the native speakers
           • foreign language instruction should focus on communicative competence and the cultural dimensions of discourse competence, not on intercultural competence.

3. NEW WAYS OF INTEGRATING LANGUAGE, CULTURE, HISTORY AND IDENTITY

   • Citizens need to learn foreign languages, for reasons either of employment or of national security.
     • foreign languages
       • Although the teaching of English in European schools is still oriented toward British or American national culture, research on English as the lingua franca of continental Europe is gaining momentum.
       • This multilingual sphere is meant to sensitize Europeans of all walks of life to cultural diversity and encourage them to embrace public multilingualism and multiculturalism
         • This entails a turn toward a more hermeneutic, reflexive, interpretive kind of teaching, in which ‘text’ can serve as a common ground: conversational texts, written texts, visual texts,
           • not as objects of philological exegeses or structural analyses but as dialogically constructed culture in action.
       • In USA, SLA research has been less interested in studying the cultural benefits of study abroad than in exploring the uses of computer-mediated communication to learn about foreign cultures without going abroad
   • culture is seen as the indispensable key to understanding speakers’ verbal behaviors and worldviews and the way they position themselves
   • heritage languages, second languages
     • This interest is in part an ecological concern for the preservation of endangered languages
       • in part a romantic need to reconnect with one’s roots in the face of the impersonal forces of the market and of information technologies
   • resignifying culture as historicity and subjectivity
     • in our contentious times, ‘culture’ has retained a sense of the irreducible, the sacred, that touches the core of who we are – our history and our subjectivity.
       • Culture is embodied history.
         • Theories on the cultural dimension of language research provide fruitful ways of bridging the individual and the social in language use.
         • They enable us to see culture as that precarious third place where our historical and subjective self gets constructed across utterances
           • turns-at-talk between the self we have just been and the self we might still become.