The Full Monty
Alan Pulverness

Learning a foreign language always implies some degree of cultural learning Languages are the result of long and complex histories and are constantly evolving to reflect the meanings that we need to express. Cross-cultural communication is not simply a question of encoding and decoding neutral messages, but a subtle process of negotiating those changing meanings. The cultural dimension to language learning presents the teacher with a considerable challenge. Should we teach the language and leave the culture to take care of itself? Should we teach students as much as we can about the culture? Or should we attempt somehow to unify language-and-culture as a single ‘package’? I want to suggest that cultural learning is a vital component of any language syllabus and that there is considerable potential in every language classroom for raising students’ level of cultural awareness.

The Full Monty was, of course, “the most successful British film of all time” and, as the slogan on the video box proclaims, “Britain’s favourite comedy” As if to prove the point, the reviews quoted on the back of the box are not from The Times, The Express or The Sun, but from The East Anglian Daily Times, The Grimsby Evening Telegraph and The Tamworth Herald Extra - three very local newspapers. The film was very funny (when I saw it, the laughter of the cinema audience made much of the dialogue inaudible), but the underlying themes were deadly serious - even if you have not seen it, you will probably know that the storyline concerns a group of unemployed Sheffield steelworkers who are driven by the hopelessness of their situation to become male strippers. (Note, incidentally, that stripper is so marked for gender that we need the adjective to make it clear that these were not female steelworkers!) Sheffield is one of the northern industrial cities that has suffered some of the worst effects of the economic and political changes of the last two decades. Interestingly, though the film was marketed as a unique phenomenon, it has a great deal in common with two other recent serious comedies: Brassed Off, about the members of a colliery brass band in a northern town where ten years after the Miners’ Strike of 1984, the mine is about to be closed down, and The Van, about two unemployed Irishmen who renovate an old van and start up their own mobile fish and chip shop. All three films use a mixture of pathos and broad comedy to explore the effects of unemployment on industrial communities; all three touch on the relationship between work and personal identity, and specifically on the way in which work is traditionally the way that men define themselves as men - the women in all these films have a sense of their own strength, which the men find disturbing and in The Full Monty, there is actually a kind of gender swap, as the men find that the only way they can assert themselves is by taking on the traditionally female role of strippers.

Until 1997 ‘the full monty’ was a little-known idiom of uncertain origin, meaning ‘the whole thing’ Of course, since the film was released, it has come to be understood as referring only to one thing - the male strippers who remove their last item of clothing to reveal...well, the full monty. When I thought of “The Full Monty” as a title for this article, I had been casting around for a snappy title that would suggest “language-and-culture - the whole package” and one that would also have a popular impact. I had not really been thinking very much about the film, only about the way in which it has had the effect of reviving the popularity of the idiom. However, on reflection, I decided that the film itself would provide me with a useful point of entry. The film is a good example, since it has been so popular with audiences in so many different countries, but if we take it (or any other current film, novel, song, TV programme or advertisement) as a text, then what kind of questions might we want learners to be able to ask about it? What kind of value might it have for them? I hope that I have already suggested a partial answer to the question: we could take the film as the centrepiece for all kinds of cultural learning - we could look at it in terms of various comparisons or sets of oppositions: employment/unemployment; the 70s, the 80s and the 90s; Thatcher, Major and Blair; masculinity/femininity; urban decay/urban renewal; industrial economy/service economy - and so on. What is perhaps missing from this catalogue (though I would hope that it is implicit) is the fact that none of these themes (with the possible exception of ‘Thatcher, Major and Blair’) need be confined to a British context - they could all could be explored equally in relation to students’ own environment - in short, rather than considering cultural (i.e. British or American studies), we should be working on intra-cultural and inter-cultural studies.

The original idea of the phrase ‘the full monty’ is one of all-inclusiveness - not leaving anything out - and that is just what I want to suggest that we, as language teachers, should be concerned about. There has been a long history, in many educational traditions, of divorcing language from literature and of divorcing language from culture. These three elements have occupied separate spaces in the curriculum, have perhaps been taught by different teachers, using different materials, and have been tested separately. When I first started teaching English as a Foreign Language in the mid-70s, I had a timetable allocation for something called “British Life and Institutions” (or BLI). This had nothing to do with teaching the language, however, but was content teaching of the most direct (and driest) kind, transmitting facts about history, the monarchy, parliamentary democracy, social, legal and educational institutions. I felt uncomfortable about this at the time, and looking back on it now, it seems to have been a blatant example of cultural imperialism, assuming a priori that all these things were worth learning about because Britain, by definition, was worth learning about.

But I did not have to suffer the pangs of post-colonial guilt for very long, as the start of my teaching career coincided with the advent of the functional-notional syllabus and the development of what became known as communicative language teaching (CLT). The central idea of CLT, which has proved extremely powerful and is still responsible for much of the language teaching that goes on around the world, can be summed up thus: that language is best learned when we receive messages - it was that simple. This principle produced three basic pedagogical practices - the need for authentic texts, the need for equally authentic tasks and the simulation of genuine interaction in the classroom through roleplay, problem-solving and, above all, information gap activities. Indeed the idea of ‘communicative activities’ became paramount, and sometimes, not altogether inaccurately, they were called ‘communicative games’ At first, such activities seemed truly liberating - after all, they replaced the sterile and monotonous model dialogues, drills and grammatical transformations of the previous era. But in privileging communication at all costs, we may have thrown the baby (i.e. meaningful content) out with the bathwater. Messages are all very well, but not if they consist of talking for the sake of talking - one of the problems with many ‘communicative activities’ is their triviality - either the content is trivial (Student A tells Student B where to locate the furniture in an imaginary room) or even when the content is more serious (Student A and Student B pool information about a nuclear power plant), the task is trivial.

In the mid-80s I was running a course on ‘Communicative Methodology’ with a group of teachers in northern Germany. One of the activities I wanted them to try out involved an information gap leading to a problem-solving task - I was particularly pleased with the material, which I thought would produce a great deal of communication - which it did, though not quite in the way that I had planned. The problem was the context: the students (in this case teachers) worked in pairs and each pair had first to share two halves of a map. When completed, the map would lead them to an island fortress, where, according to the scenario, an important military prisoner was being held. The problem-solving phase then required the pairs to work collaboratively to find the only safe escape route from the island, which was full of all kinds of hazards. A very elegant piece of material and, I thought, one of the strongest activities I had planned - I foresaw a good twenty- to thirty-minute activity which would maximise student talking time and incidentally give me the opportunity to monitor the teachers’ English (teachers being particularly keen on having their English corrected). But I was disappointed in the most startling way: as soon as they got on to the second phase of the activity and realised the nature of the scenario, the teachers refused to continue - nothing to do with the methodology, but everything to do with the content: the education system in Hesse at that time was going through a period of extreme sensitivity about anything to do with war and militarism - it was the time when Peace Studies was being introduced into the secondary curriculum. These teachers all felt so strongly about the issue which I had inadvertently raised that they were unable to complete the task, and we spent the rest of the afternoon debating the matter.

Through my own lack of awareness, I had made a cultural error, but I had also made an important discovery - that you can’t (or you shouldn’t) divorce form from content, language from what it does – that to teach language as though it is value-free and as though content doesn’t matter is irresponsible and may even be counter-productive.

[published in IATEFL Issues Issue No 148 April - May 1999]

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