The growth of interest in British Cultural Studies, both within the UK and overseas, presents a challenge to the English Language Teaching community which has both ideological and methodological dimensions.

 

English Language Teaching has been problematised in recent years as the pursuit of colonialism by other means, helping to sustain the hegemony of English in many parts of the world and contributing to the decay of minority languages and cultures. ELT practitioners have become rightly sensitive to charges of linguistic – and hence cultural – imperialism (see Phillipson 1992). There is also concern at the level of process, with some teacher educators beginning seriously to question the export of culturally inappropriate methodologies (see Holliday 1994). EFL materials writers are aware of the need to avoid alienating any section of their potential target audience who might find particular settings, topics or attitudes culturally loaded. The instrumental nature of much English language teaching means that actual or implicit contracts require the course provider to supply language training for specific, often work-related purposes; consequently, courses and materials tend to be driven by the perceived needs of clients and sponsors. This context seems to prohibit an educational perspective and affords little scope for consideration of cultural factors, beyond the domain of what Tomalin (1991) has called international business culture.

 

EFL teachers are frequently reminded that English is far more commonly used as a lingua franca between speakers of other languages than it is in communication with native speakers of English. This creates an implicit pressure on materials writers and teachers to base their practice on a model of language as a pure, value-free code. Widdowson (1993) suggests that native speakers of English can no longer claim authority as custodians of an appropriate standard model. In this climate of linguistic relativism, the idea that culture might after all be a legitimate aspect of the language teaching project seems uncomfortably reminiscent of the largely discredited tradition of teaching „British Life and Institutions” (BLI). This treated culture as a body of inherently stable social meanings to be transmitted by teachers and assimilated by students.

 

There are, however, a number of countervailing traditions of thinking about language and culture which may help to rehabilitate cultural learning as a vital and integral part of foreign language learning. The most fundamental argument has to do with the nature of language as social practice. Halliday’s formulation that “language is as it is because of what it does” suggests a view of language systems evolving to meet certain social needs and functions. Di Pietro (1987) and more recently Kramsch (1993: 27) invoke Bakhtin's view of language: “[It] is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents is a difficult and complicated process.” This feeling that language will always be encrusted with the meanings that others have given it is true for any speaker of any language, but it is particularly relevant when the speaker is coming to terms with a foreign language. To attempt to divorce language from its cultural context is to ignore the social circumstances which give it resonance and meaning. Jones (1990: 160), writing about reading as an interactive process, describes the traffic between the culture of production and the culture of reception: “The sense which a reader makes of a given text depends upon the extent of the overlap or correspondence between the culture in which the text was produced, and the culture in which it is encountered.... [P]erceptions may range from a comfortable familiarity of signs and assumptions, to a sense of dislocation and bewilderment.” The opposition comfortable familiarity/dislocation and bewilderment is equally applicable to our experience of language in general, and in particular to the encounter with a foreign language. We cannot say for certain that learners will never meet representatives of the L₂ culture and even a lingua franca does not break loose so easily from its cultural frame of reference.

 

Apart from theoretical debates about language, the restricted world of ELT is also beginning to take account of broader educational contexts. Contacts with groups of teachers from overseas and liaison between departments of EFL and departments of Education in the UK tertiary sector raise the question of cultural learning both at the level of classroom practice and that of curriculum design. How to teach civilisation/civiltà/Landeskunde is an important issue for most non-native speaker teachers of English and is no less significant a consideration for teachers of foreign languages in British schools. For a long time, the civilisation tradition bore a close resemblance to the old “BLI” model, but increased mobility, the globalisation of youth culture and the perennial need for greater international understanding have inspired a shift towards a more process-orientated model of intercultural learning, directed towards what Byram (1989) calls “a modification of monocultural awareness” and what Christopher Brumfit (in his keynote address to the 1995 IATEFL conference) described as “the discovery of self through an awareness of the politics of difference”.

 

There are a number of practical ways in which ELT might develop an agenda for intercultural learning without deviating from its obligations towards its clientèle. ELT has traditionally aimed at developing a command of the language as a systematic set of resources. Despite widespread acceptance of communicative methodology, the underlying focus of much teaching and most testing remains firmly fixed on the content of these resources - structural, lexical and phonological - rather than on the choices made by speakers (and writers) in social interaction. What enables us to function effectively in our own speech communities is not simply the inventory of language items that we are able to draw upon, but the pragmatic knowledge which equips us to make appropriate selections from that inventory. This knowledge, if not culturally determined, is at least culturally conditioned. It includes such factors as forms of address, the expression of politeness, discourse conventions and situational constraints on conversational behaviour. Although some of these features are addressed incidentally in the course of language teaching, there have been hardly any attempts in published EFL materials to deal systematically with the ways in which linguistic choices are constrained by setting, situation, status and purpose. While applied linguistics is increasingly concerned with what happens to language at text-level, a great deal of language teaching continues to operate at sentence-level. Grice’s “cooperative principle” (1975) and Lakoff’s “politeness principle” (1973) have up to now made remarkably little impact on EFL. The cultural dimension of the language itself consists of elements that are normally classed as “native speaker intuition” - the Sprachgefühl which may be achieved by only the most advanced students. A major objective for ELT in the future should be to find ways of extending its core curriculum so as to develop awareness of the socio-cultural dimensions of the language.

 

Ideally a programme of integrated language and cultural study would take place in a UK setting which furnished students with first-hand experience and the opportunity to conduct their own small-scale ethnographic research. In the absence of this possibility, a rich resource (neglected by ELT until quite recently) for raising learners’ awareness of the ways in which the language and the culture interact is the literary text. Drama and prose fiction, as well as some poetry, can offer a broad, “state of the nation” view (e.g. David Hare’s Plenty or Tony Harrison’s V), but can also give students myriad insights into the sensibilities of the British and the texture of life in contemporary Britain. McCarthy and Carter (1994: 155) describe both the challenge and the necessity of attending to literary texts: “...understanding a text can depend not simply on knowledge of word or sentence meaning but also, crucially, on cultural frames of reference and meanings.... [L]anguage is not unproblematically transparent and neutral; language is a site in which beliefs, values and points of view are produced, encoded and contested.” The very features in literary texts that might be regarded as culturally bound can provide a framework for cultural learning at the same time as exemplifying how attitudes and social relationships are realised through language. Work such as Burton’s study of dramatic dialogue and conversation (1980) and Carter and Simpson’s collection on discourse stylistics (1989) also suggests how literary stylistics can combine with discourse analysis to reveal both the similarities and the dissimilarities between naturally occurring language and the language of literature.

 

As Raymond Williams (1963: 124 - 125) points out, there is a long tradition, going back to Carlyle and Coleridge, of thinking and writing about culture as „a whole way of life”. Williams goes on to cite Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy defining culture in integrative terms which should be particularly resonant for any English language teachers who are concerned about their rôle as educators and not just as language trainers:

Culture says: “Consider these people then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds...”

 

References

·         Burton D (1980) Dialogue and Discourse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)

·         Byram M (1989) Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters)

·         Carter R A & Simpson P [Eds] (1989) Language, Discourse and Literature: an Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics (London: Unwin Hyman/Routledge)

·         Di Pietro R (1987) Strategic Interaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

·         Grice H P (1975) "Logic and Conversation" in Cole P & Morgan J [Eds] Syntax and Semantics, Vol 9: Pragmatics

·         Holliday A (1994) Appropriate Methodology and Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

·         Jones N (1990) "Reader, Writer, Text" in Carter R [Ed] Knowledge about Language and the Curriculum: a LINC Rreader (London: Hodder & Stoughton)

·         Kramsch C (1993) Context and Culture in Language Teaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

·         Lakoff R (1973) "The logic of politeness; or minding your p's and q's" in Papers from the 9th regional meeting, Chicago Linguistics Society (Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society)

·         McCarthy M & Carter R A (1994) Language as Discourse: perspectives for language teaching (London: Longman)

·         Phillipson R (1992) Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

·         Tomalin B (1991) "Teaching about Culture - the last ten years" Presentation at The British Council 10th Annual Conference (Bologna)

·         Widdowson H G (1993) "The ownership of English" in IATEFL Newsletter No 120 (Whitstable: IATEFL)

·         Williams R (1963) Culture and Society 1780 - 1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

 

[published in British Studies Now Anthology Issues 6 – 10 The British Council 1999]