Anne-Brit Fenner
Most educators would agree that cultural awareness is an important aim in foreign language teaching. There are, however, differing views on what cultural and intercultural awareness is, and how learners can be encouraged and assisted in moving towards this goal.
In considering cultural awareness in relation to textbooks, I would first like to discuss the term in a wider educational and methodological context. In this context I find it useful to look at two different ways of defining education: according to the Oxford Dictionary the term can mean 'instruction' or it can mean 'development and personal growth'. If we, as textbook authors, regard our task solely as providing reading material and exercises in order to transmit a set of skills that might enable the learner to cope in a foreign country, we are faced with a purely instrumental and utilitarian view of foreign language teaching.
This is the traditional view of teaching culture, which has its roots in teaching methods long before the advent of a communicative approach to language learning with its focus on the learner. Instruction by the teacher or textbook followed by exercises designed to make the learner merely reproduce or copy language rather than produce his or her own, is very difficult to combine with the development of personal awareness on the part of the learner. If we only try to provide a body of knowledge, hoping that it can be transferred to the learner by the teacher or the textbook, we reinforce what Bourdieu (1994) calls' symbolic power'; i.e. we enforce, through our choice of teaching material, our own values upon the learners without giving them a chance to develop a critical awareness of this knowledge. And in so doing, we manage to preserve our own set of values. If, on the other hand, we regard education as 'development and personal growth', our aim must be to give the learner opportunity to develop cultural knowledge, competence and awareness in such a way that it might lead to a better understanding of the foreign culture, the 'other', as well as of the learner's own culture, the ‘self’.
The former definition of education, 'instruction', falls into a category of teaching where the relationship between teacher and learner, or textbook and learner, can be categorized as a subject-object relationship (Skjervheim 1992). In a cultural awareness context, the encounter between one's own and the foreign culture can be seen in terms of a similar type of relationship, with the foreign culture as object while 'I, myself and 'my culture' constitute the subject. In such a relationship it will always be the aim of the subject to impose its own cultural values upon the object. Historically and politically, the relationship between colonial powers and their colonies can be characterized and recognized in this way. In a foreign language learning context such a view, conscious or unconscious, may result in an attitude towards the foreign culture which enhances symbolic power instead of resulting in cultural awareness as a basis for developing empathy and tolerance. Rather than remaining in a subject - object relationship with the learners within which they are 'instructed' or taught about culture, textbooks and teachers need to open up ways in which learners can gain insights into the foreign culture in a subject - subject relationship; in other words, a dialectic process between equals. Is it possible for textbook authors to provide material and tasks which can assist such a process?
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About Me
- Colombia
- Pamplona, Nsder, Colombia
- Master in Teaching English as a Foreign Language.
What to teach?
ReplyDeleteBefore trying to come up with answers, we need to examine how cultural knowledge and cultural and socio-cultural competence are dealt with in many foreign language textbooks and classrooms today. Teaching culture has focused mainly upon two aspects:
a) teaching about the foreign culture
b) teaching and learning of socio-linguistic and socio-cultural behaviour within the framework of a communicative approach
As far as a) is concerned, traditional textbooks have contained a series of texts, often created by the authors, about the foreign culture, followed by reproduction exercises with the aim of learning and accepting facts. The knowledge taught in such a context has, in some countries, been termed 'background' or 'civilization' in English, 'Landeskunde' in German. The word 'background' is in itself quite revealing if we analyse what view of culture is inherent in this type of teaching. It implies forming the background to something else, namely language, which is in the 'foreground', and, therefore, must be regarded as more important. This view creates a dividing line between culture and language, seeing them as separate entities rather than two aspects of the same. However important the facts in themselves may be, the language in which they are presented, and what the learners are supposed to do with the facts, are a crucial means of developing cultural awareness.
Textbooks for primary and lower secondary school have dealt with b) through dialogues and patterns of ritual speech acts of what to say in specific situations followed by, for instance, role play exercises of similar situations. This methodology in its extreme form resulted in coursebooks which were almost devoid of content.
If our aim is to give learners an opportunity to develop cultural awareness, neither a) nor b) is sufficient. Both are important, yet there is something missing. In order to find out what this is, I believe it is necessary to take a closer look at what we today conceive of as 'culture'.
Whose culture?
ReplyDeleteIf we look at the term historically, culture was seen purely as the classical cultural heritage up to the Early Renaissance. During the Romantic period 'national culture and identity' and 'the way people lived' were included in an understanding of the term. Today we can talk about at least two types of culture, 'culture of the elite' and 'culture of the people', or 'elitist' culture and 'common' culture, 'common' here understood as the everyday lives of ordinary people. Foreign language teaching in primary and lower secondary education has in recent years focused primarily on the latter.
During the 20th century it has become possible to envisage a separation between culture and the way we live, while as before the two were not only interrelated, but also interdependent. People were born into a culture and stayed there. But for the first time, historically, the 20th century regards identity as something we can create for ourselves;
we have, in fact, a choice of culture. Young people are not only aware of this, but also frequent users of the opportunity to choose between different cultures or subcultures.
Culture can be seen as the identity common to a society or a group of people within that society, but it is also the way members of the society regard this common identity. If we only regard culture as something that 'can be found out there', e.g. paintings, football, literature, food, etc., we will tend to view different cultures or subcultures as objects from a distance. But culture is more than artefacts that 'can be found out there', it is also the glasses through which we perceive the world around us and the language we use to express the culture of which we are an integral part. We are influenced by the culture(s) we are socialized into, and simultaneously we influence that culture. This is a dialectic process, and culture must be seen as a dynamic force in continuous flux, not a static entity. The process does not only take place within our own culture; a similar process constitutes the encounter with a foreign culture.
Language as culture
ReplyDeleteLanguage or text is probably the most influential factor in the dynamic interrelationship between cultures. If culture is not only what we see, but also the way we see it and the language we use to express it, culture cannot merely be regarded as a body of knowledge which can be transmitted to the learners by the teacher or the textbook. Culture can be seen as 'a web of spoken and written texts, a linguistic landscape consisting of an indefinite number of texts'. (Time 1989) Language is not only communication, but equally important, it is an expression of culture. It differs from other artefacts of culture in that it can be used to express itself about itself. Through teaching and through textbook tasks the visibility of language and text should be preserved. By that I mean that all aspects of the written or spoken text must be 'seen' and not made invisible, which often happens in the classroom when one only concentrates on the subject-matter of the text or on specific linguistic features. The text as a whole, as an entity of form and content, is the carrier and expression of culture. This requires authentic text, text in the widest sense of the word: i.e. spoken texts, written texts of different genres, paintings, etc.
Knowledge (savoir)
ReplyDeleteCultural awareness is based on knowledge of the foreign culture, but also on knowledge of one's own culture. Any process of comparison or contrasting has its starting point in the learner's pre-knowledge. I have previously stated that culture is more than what is 'out there', it is also how we see what is there. From this it naturally follows that the learner's perception of his or her own culture as well as of the foreign culture are important factors in the development of cultural awareness of the individual. And we are talking about individual processes: the learner's 'habitus' (Bourdieu 1994: 12) and 'cultural capital' (Bourdieu 1994:14) vary from one learner to the other. 'Habitus' as used by Bourdieu is a 'set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways'. The dispositions reflect social conditions of the individual's background and differ from one social class to another, and even more from one nationality to another. According to Bourdieu the learner's habitus will generate practices, perceptions and attitudes which are not consciously co¬ordinated and will thus be a determining factor in acquiring knowledge. 'Cultural capital' is a concept used by Bourdieu to describe the knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions which the individual possesses. Again this is dependent on social background and will vary from one learner to another. In our context it must be seen as an educational goal to increase the individual's cultural capital, building on what each learner brings into school and the language classroom.
Facts are important in the process of building up knowledge. Over the past decades, however, textbooks have perhaps contained too little factual knowledge. Methodology has focused more on how to develop communicative skills from what might seem a bare minimum of cultural facts, and these facts have been mainly concerned with the everyday lives of representatives of the foreign language community, to a large extent the everyday lives of young people. In a misunderstood attempt to engage and motivate young learners, textbook authors have constructed a large number of texts about discotheques and hobbies, texts without conflict, which many learners find boring. Might it not be that this age group is more interested in the unknown and exotic than in their own lives and their own problems?
It is difficult to decide whether a particular age group is interested in specific topics; the main aim must be to present learners with a variety of texts in a variety of genres so that there might be something for most learners to identify with in one way or another. Paintings, photographs, music and written texts should, for the reasons I have suggested, to a large extent be authentic. There is a vast difference between a text relating or describing a specific phenomenon in the foreign culture, written by a foreign textbook author seen with the foreigner's eyes, and the text on the same topic written for children or young people within the native culture. Either point of view is of interest, but inter-cultural awareness depends on a knowledge of both.
It is difficult to state what specific topics should be represented in foreign language textbooks in order to form the basis for the development of cultural awareness. Any end-determined list will be reductionist and limiting. Still, I find it necessary to state that both writers and users of textbooks need to be aware of the fact that texts represent not only content and form, but also a personal representation, either by a foreign language writer or a native speaker. In addition the reader's personal interpretation of the text within his or her own 'horizon' constitutes the outcome of the reading or listening process.
Literature and other authentic texts
ReplyDeleteThe literary text has been greatly underestimated in recent foreign language learning. It represents the personal voice of a culture and, secondly, a voice that young people can easily identify with. The communicative approach to foreign language learning has, to a certain extent, disregarded the literary text as a potential for learning language and encountering the foreign culture. I believe there are three main reasons for this. First, there is the fact that literature is traditionally associated with bourgeois, elitist culture and has been defined by methodologists as an artefact outside the 'real world' of young learners. Secondly, it is due to the way 'culture' was defined in foreign language teaching at the time the communicative approach developed, namely as the everyday lives of representatives of the foreign culture. Focus was thus on how to behave in everyday social situations. Thirdly, part of the reason can be found in prevailing Anglo-American literary theory in the 1960s and 70s, in 'New Criticism', with its focus on the text itself, not on biographical information as previously, nor on the interrelationship between text and reader and the reader as co-producer of meaning. The close reading of 'New Criticism' in the foreign language classroom put too much emphasis on literary analysis of text, and tended to be dominated by the teacher's 'correct' interpretation. Since then literary theory has concentrated increasingly on the reader's creative role in the reading process. When reading is regarded as a communicative dialogue with the text, new opportunities open up in the encounter between two cultures, as reflected in the literary text.
Learning a language entails undergoing(understand) a process of being socialized into a culture, and learning a foreign language means being socialized into that particular foreign culture. One can argue that this socialization process can and will, to a certain extent, be selective, but it is difficult to argue that what I have previously termed 'culture of the people' is the only culture we want our learners to be socialized into and to develop an awareness of. We also have a responsibility to give our students a chance to enhance(improve,intensify) their cultural capital and to give them access to the literary canon and thus the 'symbolic power' we as teachers and textbook authors possess and exercise (Bourdieu 1994). T believe this access to be necessary if we want our learners to develop into critical human beings. School education in general and language learning in particular can provide this opportunity for 'personal growth' or 'Bildung'.
Reading an authentic literary text in the foreign language can be seen as a personal encounter with the foreign culture. If the process of reading and interpreting a text is seen as an attempt to produce meaning from the multiplicity and polyphony of that particular text, the learner enters into a dialogue with the text and the foreign culture in a productive subject-subject relationship. The reading process is individual and authentic and there is not only scope(possibilities) for the individual learner's interpretation and understanding, but also a need for it. Without the reader, the text is just a series of written signs on paper; it is the individual reader with his or her pre-knowledge and 'personal constructs' (Kelly 1963) who brings meaning to the text. He or she becomes a participant in a creative process of establishing knowledge of a culture as well as developing culture as a dynamic force.
Socio-cultural Competence (savoir-faire)
ReplyDeleteUsually socio-cultural competence is seen as a set of skills which the foreign language learner has to be acquainted(familiarizeng)with in order to cope in the target culture. As argued previously, it has been one of the two main components in the teaching of culture, increasing greatly in importance with the development of a communicative approach to language teaching. Through dialogues and other speech-patterns textbooks have given the foreign language learner models for what to say and how to act in various hypothetical social situations in the target culture. Sample dialogues have often been followed by role-play and information gap tasks. Such tasks can be important for developing socio-cultural skills, but they tend to become ritualistic and meaningless to the learner. Also one can question the belief that learners will automatically be able to transfer skills developed in the classroom to the real situation. Because neither skills nor knowledge can be transferred automatically, socio-cultural competence has to be developed through a more comprehensive understanding of interaction with the foreign culture.
What happens in the foreign language classroom is usually a simulation of encounters and communication with the foreign language and culture. There is no reason why we should not make this simulated situation as close to real interaction with the foreign culture as possible. A first step in this process is to define the encounter as interaction and to choose approaches which enhance the interactional aspect. Interaction can be with texts spoken by real people or it can be with written texts. Through dialogue and interaction with the text, the learners have a chance to reinterpret their understanding of the world, also the world outside the classroom in which the authentic text has been produced.
Developing cultural awareness in foreign language learning is dependent on communication with oral and written texts, and, as I have argued previously, preferably authentic texts. This is where the learner encounters language as culture. Dialogue with authentic spoken or written texts is necessary if we understand communication as both interpretation and negotiation. It is, therefore, not sufficient for the learner to encode or decode language. Genuine communication is a more complex process. Learners need to become aware of the fact that communication, and inter-cultural communication in particular, entails misunderstanding and conflict. Although learners obtain procedural knowledge and skills of how to behave in a foreign language community and what to say in specific situations, misunderstanding will always be part of communication, even in an intra-cultural context.
Part of cultural and intercultural competence and awareness is to be able to cope with the complexity of communication and to be aware of the fact that misunderstanding is part of the communication process. Each learner brings his or her own knowledge and capacity for understanding into the encounter with the foreign language and culture. This makes each encounter unique and different from one learner to the other. By making this uniqueness a topic for common classroom communication, the foreign language classroom can become a platform from which an understanding of both intracultural and intercultural differences of perception can develop into awareness.
It must be one of the aims of textbook writers to create tasks that enable the learners to interact on as many levels as possible with the foreign culture, represented through oral and written texts. This is only possible if at least some of the tasks are open-ended without correct or incorrect answers. The learners' suggestions will then form the basis for discussion. Thus their understanding of the world becomes the stance from which they can gain a better knowledge of and insight into the foreign culture.
Attitude (savoir être)
ReplyDeleteBeing in a proper dialogue can be a painful process. Interaction with 'the other' is having to readjust one's own points of view. One enters into the process with a conscious or subconscious attitude of wanting to influence or persuade 'the other'. This is even more the case when 'the other' is a foreign culture expressed in a foreign language. Foucault employs the term 'agonism' for the interplay between forces in a dialogical process, a 'relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle' (Foucault 1983: 221-22). It is painful because one tends to defend one's own position and resist a change of attitude and opinion. Interpreting and understanding a foreign culture entails changing some of one's own views, readjusting one's scheme structures. In a foreign language learning context one should not be surprised when tolerance and understanding are not immediate results of learning a foreign language and encountering a foreign culture. Sometimes the opposite is the short-term result: learners see the other culture in stereotyped ways. Stereotyping is not necessarily negative if we see it as a simplification in order to cope with complex and unfamiliar situations. In some ways it resembles the processes of 'overgeneralization' or 'strategy of second-language learning' which we find in Selinker's interlanguage theory (1972: 217-19) and can be interpreted as a stage in a continuous process of developing awareness of the foreign culture.
Through textbook tasks one can help make these attitudes conscious and visible in order to provide opportunity to talk about them. Questions and tasks that focus on attitude and understanding can form the basis for what I choose to call 'authentic dialogue' in the foreign language classroom. 'Authentic dialogue' must here be understood as dialogue which has no predetermined answers, it is open-ended and will itself produce possible answers. In that light even stereotyped views can open up for an enhanced understanding of the foreign culture. This type of classroom dialogue does not control the learner's knowledge, but uses the learner's understanding as classroom material. Thus the individual's interpretation and understanding of aspects of the foreign culture is taken into account. Textbooks have an important role to play in such a change of focus from teacher to learner. By providing texts and tasks which open up for the individual's interpretation and then using this in social dialogue in the classroom, the learner is given the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with the foreign culture.
Understanding 'the other'
ReplyDeleteIt is a fallacy to believe that we can reach a point where we will be able to understand 'the other' completely. We do not even understand ourselves and our own culture to such an extent. But in the foreign language classroom it is important to open up for a variety of encounters with the foreign culture and provide possibilities for reflecting individually and in a social context upon these encounters. This also means reflecting upon the multiplicity of meaning that exists in any culture and which can be made potentially available through various types of texts. Textbooks and teachers can assist this process, which Ricoeur calls a process of reflection, which 'extends our existence' and helps us show the learners a way to a 'savoir être' which is based upon understanding: 'le mode de cet être qui existe en comprenant' (1969:11).
For textbook writers the question is how can we provide the best possible grounds for the learners to gain knowledge and awareness of the foreign culture as well as their own in order to 'develop as human beings' or in Ricoeur's words: 'extend their existence'. When discussing what to teach at the beginning of this article, I argued that there was a missing link between knowledge of the foreign culture and procedural socio-cultural skills. I believe that what is lacking is communication and interaction, a dialectic dialogue between two or more subjects interpreting and negotiating meaning. Ricoeur (Kvalsvik 1985) argues that only through interaction with others, and not through introspection, can we experience our own identity. In a context of dialogue with the foreign culture, I want to interpret 'others' as both texts and persons.
Ricoeur's view adds to the above an aspect of cultural awareness which I believe to be essential in relation to personal development and growth: through interaction with the 'other' one gains an increased understanding not only of the 'other', but also of 'self. The foreign culture provides the mirror in which we can see ourselves reflected; it provides an outside to our inside.
While learning a foreign language, the learner will bring his own culture into the communication process with the foreign culture, whether it is in reading a foreign text or in speaking to a representative of that particular language community. With regard to intercultural awareness this must be seen as an interdependent relationship between cultures which constitutes a dynamic enrichment for 'self as well as the 'other'.