Conventional accounts of recent ELT history rightly identify the advent of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in the late 70s/early 80s as a significant turning point. The paradigm shift from an approach based largely on form and structure to a plurality of approaches informed by a concern for meaning introduced a new ‘reality principle’ to syllabus design and classroom delivery. One unintended side effect, however, has been the marginalising, or even the exclusion, of the cultural dimension of language learning. Needs analysis, inventories of functions and genuine (or simulated) communicative interaction all tend to emphasise instrumental purposes and transactional uses of language. Authenticity is a central concept in CLT, and authentic texts are often said to ‘bring culture into the classroom’. But even when texts are authentic rather than deliberately constructed to exemplify specific language items, they still tend to be treated as vehicles for developing language skills in a cultural vacuum.

 

Culture-free?

There is a complex set of reasons for our difficulties with the ‘C’-word. We lack any equivalent for the European language teaching tradition of cultural learning, and Cultural Studies is still in the process of defining and establishing itself as an academic discipline. Certainly, mere transmission teaching of culture with a capital ‘C’ has long been consigned to the dustbin of ELT history. CLT, after all, is concerned with real language use in the real world, and the tradition of simply transmitting information about heritage culture has had no place in the utilitarian climate of the 80s and 90s. The shift to CLT has also been accompanied by a growing sense of unease amongst more thoughtful practitioners about the politics of ELT, specifically about the export of prevailing orthodoxies through internationally marketed coursebooks and the well-meaning evangelism of newly trained teachers. A number of provocative critiques (probably the best-known being Phillipson 1992) have diagnosed an implicit cultural superiority underlying the ELT export industry, and have produced a climate of professional self-doubt, or at least self-questioning.

 

The undeniable growth of English as an international language is clearly another factor that presents a serious challenge to the inclusion of cultural content in a language teaching programme as anything other than contextual background. Even in that form, so the argument goes, it is at best irrelevant to the needs, say, of a Japanese salesperson negotiating in English with a Norwegian buyer. As for establishing a curriculum thread for something called ‘British Studies’, wasn’t this just a trendy new name for bad old ‘British Life and Institutions’?

 

The outcome of these various uncertainties and sensitivities has been a reluctance to engage with cultural context at any significant level. The philosopher’s stone for the international publishing market is supposedly the ‘culture-free’ book that can be used without any fear of any uncomfortable ‘culture bumps’ anywhere in the world.

 

Culture-bound?

Culture Bound was the ironic title of Merrill Valdes’ 1986 collection of papers, which was actually concerned with ways of integrating cultural learning and language learning. The book’s title could perhaps be understood as „Bound to Teach Culture”, since the authors all start from the assumption that since language is never value-free (ie culture-free), learning a foreign language – for whatever purpose – inevitably has cultural implications.

 

Over the last decade a positive case for a ‘culture-bound’ approach has been made by a number of writers, including Byram (1989) and Kramsch (1993). This does not imply that ‘culture-bound’ should be understood in a restrictive, monocultural sense, but rather that languages themselves, as the products of particular social histories, are by definition bound by culture. To represent a language as an abstract code and language learning as purely a matter of mastering a different code is to deprive learners of whole domains of knowledge and understanding. Cultures are always richly diverse, even though it often suits national leaders to represent them as monolithic. Learners, too, are as culturally diverse as the speakers of the languages they are learning, and each learner achieves his or her own idiosyncratic accommodation with linguistic and cultural difference, becoming an inter-cultural speaker, finding a personal space that does not belong wholly to one culture or the other - what Kramsch calls “third places” and Byram describes as “a modification of monocultural awareness”.

 

The cultural paradigm shift

The Zeitgeist of the 80s favoured the growth of utilitarian methodologies that constructed the learner either as an international sales executive or as a tourist-consumer. At the turn of the century, the rapid globalisation of culture is producing a new concern with forms of inter-cultural identity. The ‘international’ coursebook is meeting the same kind of resistance as other kinds of globally marketed products. Perhaps it is not surprising that some of the most innovative ‘language-and-culture’ materials are coming from teachers in Central and Eastern Europe, where for the last ten years questions of national identity have been so vital.

 

References

·         Byram M Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education Multilingual Matters 1989

·         Cichirdan A et al Crossing Cultures: British Cultural Studies for 12^th Grade Romanian Students The British Council, Romania/Cavallioti Publishers

·         Holliday A Appropriate methodology and Social Context CUP 1994

·         Kramsch C Context and Culture in Language Teaching OUP 1993

·         Merrill Valdes J (Ed) Culture Bound CUP 1986

·         Phillipson R Linguistic Imperialism OUP 1992

·         Sixty teachers of English in Bulgaria Branching Out: a Cultural Studies Syllabus The British Council, Bulgaria/Tilia Ltd 1998

 

[published in English Teaching Porfessional Issue 14 January 2000]