Anyone just beginning a career in Teaching English as a Foreign Language might find it surprising that the profession only now seems to be recognising the importance of the cultural dimension of language learning. There are a number of tendencies in the recent history of English Language Teaching (ELT) which might explain why its relationship with cultural learning has been such an uncertain one.

 

The work of The Council of Europe in the early 1970s (which produced the ‘Threshold Level’ of communicative competence) and the subsequent development of communicative language teaching were informed by a view of English as an international language. English was seen as a means of communication which should not be bound to culturally specific conditions of use, but should be easily transferable to any cultural setting. Authenticity was a key quality, but only insofar as it provided reliable models of language in use. Content was important as a source of motivation, but it was seen as equally important to avoid material which might be regarded as ‘culture-bound’. Throughout the late 1970s and much of the 1980s, syllabus design and materials writing were driven by needs analysis and culture was subordinated to performance objectives. A representative view comes from Cunningsworth (1984):

A limitation of the culture-specific coursebook is that it will only be of relevance to students who understand the cultural background in which it is set.... Indeed [...] a strong portrayal of British life might well prove to be an impediment rather than a help to the learner.

Cunningsworth goes on to warn teachers against materials which concentrate on „the structuring of the social world in which the learner is never likely to find himself” and he notes the “vast success [of books with a] relative lack of culture specificity” and transparent situations for the presentation of language items, which have the effect of making the material “readily acceptable in almost any country in the world”. Many publishers and coursebook writers understandably continue to heed these words – at best producing materials centred on topics with a fairly broad trans-cultural appeal, but at worst resulting in materials which could be set anywhere. Very often, culture-specific content seems to have been carefully screened out of the material, so that settings are rendered bland and colourless.

 

The growth of communicative language teaching was accompanied by a decline in interest in two areas which had traditionally formed part of the EFL curriculum: literature and British Life and Institutions (BLI). There seemed to be little justification for continuing to include topic areas which belonged to a ‘pre-scientific’ era of ELT and which played no part in developing communicative competence. The study of literature was reduced to the preparation of „set texts” (which have since become optional) for Cambridge examinations and BLI was marginalised or disappeared from syllabuses altogether.

 

Another reason for the dissociation of culture from EFL has to do with British attitudes to the very notion of culture. The British are uncomfortable with the word itself: it was only with the advent of the Labour government in May 1997 that the Department of National Heritage was renamed the Department for Culture, Sport and the Media; in France civilisation forms part of language studies, in Italy it is civiltà, in Germany and Austria Landeskunde, but in Britain it is still „background studies”. Lacking any tradition of cultural learning, we have perhaps found it easy to divorce it from language learning, or at least to relegate it to the level of background. Culture in EFL coursebooks has, for the past couple of decades, tended to provide background - contexts for the presentation of a language syllabus. Culture for the most part continues to be viewed as something that will happen to students, something that they will somehow absorb, while the proper business of a language course is seen as teaching the language; where culture is present, it is restricted to the status of supplementary, background information.

 

In recent years, these tendencies have been reinforced by politically sensitive attitudes to the imposition of any single cultural perspective. The case against the export of culture through language teaching, persuasively advanced by Robert Phillipson in Linguistic Imperialism (1992), reflects the sense of post-colonial guilt felt by many EFL teachers: “...the ‘white man’s burden’ [has become] the English native-speaking teacher’s burden, and...the role played by ELT is integral to the functioning of the contemporary world order.” At a time when Britain no longer occupies a dominant political position in the world, it is perhaps reassuring for teachers to feel that they are permitted to treat English purely in terms of a language system, uncomplicated by any cultural sub-text. Cultural knowledge in EFL classrooms (in the UK at least) has remained largely peripheral to language learning, acquired by students incidentally, but rarely focussed on for its own sake.

 

Since the late 1980s, however, the communicative consensus has begun to give way to a more pluralistic set of approaches (often labelled ‘principled eclecticism’). Our view of what language is and how it works has become more complex, a shift which is beginning to be reflected in materials and in classrooms. Syllabuses are no longer either structural or functional, but multiple; the focus of language teaching is tending increasingly away from the level of the sentence and towards the level of discourse; and there is growing interest in social and expressive functions of language which are broader in scope than the merely transactional. It is in this climate that literature has gradually been rehabilitated, for its creative linguistic playfulness and for its affective potential, rather than for its traditional, canonical status as culture with a capital C. This renewed attention to literature, together with the increasing popularity of video in the classroom, has contributed to a reappraisal of the place of cultural learning in ELT.

 

There are still plenty of ‘background’ books in print (and presumably in use) on Britain and the British. Yet relatively few course materials acknowledge in any systematic way that the experience of learners coming to the UK to learn English (and perhaps also that of learners encountering English outside the UK) is in many fundamental ways, an experience of gaining increased cultural, as well as linguistic, awareness. In the past few years, however, a number of books have appeared on British (lower case) life and institutions and some main coursebooks have also begun to acknowledge cultural learning as a significant component of language learning. This trend was reinforced by the publication of Tomalin and Stempleski’s Cultural Awareness (1993). In their introduction, the authors make the simple and useful distinction between what they call ‘big C’ (or „achievement”) Culture and ‘little c’ (or ‘behaviour’) culture. They point out that although interest has been growing in ‘little c’ culture and the ways in which it is manifested through linguistic and paralinguistic behaviour, the coverage of these areas in coursebooks has rarely got beyond the incidental and the anecdotal. The cultural assumptions, the shared frame of reference, the social contexts in which language operates, are what get lost in the translation from language user to language learner. In teaching English for communication and neglecting culture, we may actually be giving learners access to an impoverished means of communication, effective for survival and for routine transactions, but lacking much of the cultural resonance that makes it fully meaningful for native speakers.

 

EFL practitioners have often tended to regard the communicative approach as an example which has been followed in the teaching and testing of other languages in British secondary schools. It is within state secondary education, however, that the importance of cultural learning is more fully acknowledged. The interrelationship between language learning and cultural learning has been explored in depth by Michael Byram. The basis of Byram’s position is a view of language as a cultural phenomenon, embodying the values and meanings particular to a specific society, referring to the traditions and artefacts of that society and signalling its people’s sense of themselves – their cultural identity: “To teach foreign culture is to introduce [learners] to new meaning systems and their associated symbols, to provide them with the opportunity to acquire new competences and to allow them to reflect upon their own culture and cultural competence.” The tacit assumption behind approaches which strive at all costs to avoid being culture-bound is that language can somehow stand alone and be taught/learned as a value-free symbolic system. But the social nature of language militates against separating it from its original cultural points of reference, even (perhaps especially) in overseas contexts, where the learner’s contact with the culture is largely confined to the foreign language classroom. Certainly when the course is taking place in the UK, it seems almost perverse to attempt to divorce language learning from its cultural implications.

 

However, Cultural Studies does not simply represent a return to the national self-promotion of BLI. Cultural learning will only be truly meaningful if it is comparative and contrastive. If we accept the view that teaching culture involves exposing learners to a new set of values, meanings and symbols, then it follows that these new phenomena can only be understood in the light of learners' existing cultural experience. The process of comparison and contrast will lead not only to an engagement with the stimulus culture, but also to a greater understanding of the learner's own culture. In learning a foreign language, we are not only gaining access to a different way of seeing the world; we are inevitably led to reconsider our own world-view and in this sense all cultural learning can be said to be inter-cultural.

 

Students who come to the UK to learn English will be exposed to a rich and potentially bewildering range of cultural experience. Learners are surrounded, if not bombarded, with all kinds of cultural stimuli and sense impressions: from the moment they arrive, they receive ‘messages’ - if classroom teaching concentrates on language form and a limited set of transactional functions, if it does nothing to exploit and take advantage of the cultural experience that learners are undergoing, then many of these messages will remain an incomprehensible stream – the hidden seven-eighths of a cultural iceberg. It is all too easy for students to pass through the experience of a course in the UK in a kind of cultural vacuum, giving rise to comments in end-of-course evaluations about how they would have liked to have the opportunity to meet more British people and even the observation that they could have followed the same course without leaving home! Students learning English outside the UK will suffer an even greater sense of dislocation if the language is studied and practised with little or no reference to its cultural underpinning.

 

In the same way as learners are encouraged to develop awareness of language and to become conscious of their own individual learning styles and strategies, it should be the responsibility of language teachers to encourage them to develop a parallel awareness of culture. The relationship between cultural knowledge/experience and cultural awareness mirrors that between language learning and language awareness (see Byram 1989: 136-148). Since the foreign language is the medium through which cultural learning is taking place, the two pairs of relationships are also interrelated. The foreign language becomes a tool for learning about the foreign culture and the foreign culture becomes a source for learning the foreign language. The foreign language classroom offers an ideal arena for developing a critical awareness of cultural diversity: “...the integration of language learning and culture learning...is in sharp contrast with a consumer-tourist competence which offers [learners] the opportunity to reach a critical threshold...”. A comparative approach ought to lead to reflection by learners on both cultures and on the differences between them - what Byram calls “a modification of monocultural awareness”. From a very early stage (of language learning), students can be encouraged to differentiate between cultural codes and meanings, to evaluate their experience and to articulate a critical response to that experience.

 

Where the traditional BLI approach suggested a view of the learner merely as a consumer, the role of the learner in a Cultural Studies model is much more akin to that of the social anthropologist. To pursue the metaphor of the language learner as ethnographer, cross-cultural learning should involve the student as a “participant observer”: the aim, according to Byram, “must be to participate in [the foreign culture] and experience it from within, as well as observe it and understand it from without”. However, the aim of cross-cultural awareness takes the model one stage further: “Cultural awareness teaching should...involve both viewpoints, making learners both ethnographer and informant, allowing them to gain a perspective through comparison which is neither entirely one nor the other. In the process of comparison from two viewpoints there lies the possibility of...acquiring new schemata and an intercultural competence.”

 

In a sense, this kind of learning has always gone on in EFL classrooms, but it has usually taken place in the margins and has rarely formed part of any formal syllabus objectives, apart from some isolated pockets of ‘content’ teaching. Yet students are naturally curious about the attitudes, values and behaviours of the users of the language they are learning and about how these elements of the stimulus culture are realised in the language. EFL teachers may feel uncomfortable with the idea that what they are engaged in might go beyond language training and into the realms of education. As Alan Maley writes in his foreword to Tomalin and Stempleski’s book:

...what we can do is to raise awareness of cultural factors. In so doing, we shall aim to sharpen observation, encourage critical thinking about cultural stereotypes, and develop tolerance. These are educational issues which reach out well beyond mere language teaching. Cultural awareness-raising is an aspect of values education. As such it offers a welcome opportunity for transcending the often narrow limits of language teaching.

This “opportunity” – to make language learning more meaningful by relating it to cultural learning – presents materials writers and teachers with the possibility of exploring areas of content which have long been excluded from mainstream ELT. The whole range of cultural experience that represents contemporary Britain becomes available. Courses might be concerned with the changes wrought by Thatcherism in the 80s, with the „four nations” and nationalism, with ethnic and cultural diversity, or with all or none of these. The organisation of an individual syllabus and the methodology employed will depend on familiar variables, such as the language level and interests of particular groups of learners, but will also be influenced by more specific cross-cultural similarities and differences. It is in the domain of content that we should look to what is happening in British Studies.

 

What is British Studies? Although acknowledged as a graduate subject at many universities outside the UK and starting to be offered at a number of British universities, British Studies is still a relatively new academic field. Approaches vary, depending on which university faculties are involved, and courses draw on a variety of established disciplines, such as history, sociology and politics. These approaches are often supported by input from departments of literature and linguistics, film studies and media studies, which provide readily available sources of data. This may seem very far removed from what it is possible to achieve with all but the most advanced language students. Certainly many primary texts (novels, films, articles etc) will be too difficult to deal with, but the principle of an interdisciplinary approach should not be too alien to most EFL teachers. They already make use of a wide range of authentic materials, including advertisements, contemporary songs and literary texts and they are accustomed to operating multi-media classrooms. But up to now all the authentic materials and the technological resources have been used exclusively in the service of language learning. Their pedagogical habit is to look at content - whether it is a news story, a poem, a vox pop interview or an extract from a soap opera – purely as a vehicle for language development. Texts are all too often pretexts for presenting/practising language. After all, they are language teachers and their attitude as language teachers is revealed in comments such as „It generated a lot of language” or „It lends itself really well to an information gap activity”. The challenge to those teachers who are interested in „transcending the often narrow limits of language teaching” is to make cross-cultural awareness a central issue in teaching at the same time as developing students’ linguistic competence.

 

[published in Modern English Teacher Vol 4 N^o 2 Modern English Publications/Macmillan April 1995]