An Intercultural Approach To English Language Teaching

by John Corbett

Overview

Intercultural language education has redefined the modern languages agenda in Europe and North America.  Now intercultural learning is also beginning to impact on English Language Teaching.  This accessible book introduces teachers of EFL to intercultural language education by describing its history and theoretical principles, and by giving examples of classroom tasks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781853596834
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	11/11/2003
Series:	Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education Series , #7
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Corbett is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Language at the University of Glasgow.  He has taught EFL and British Cultural Studies, and been involved in teacher development in Italy, Russia, South America and the UK. His past publications are on ELT, Stylistics and Translation Studies.

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An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching

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By John Corbett

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2003 John Corbett
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85359-683-4

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CHAPTER 1

An Intercultural Approach to Second Language Education

This chapter introduces intercultural language teaching by addressing the following issues:

• The limitations of a 'communicative' model of linguistic interaction.

• Intercultural communicative competence, and its relevance to both state sector and commercial ELT.

• The main theoretical influences on intercultural communicative competence.

• A review of the role of 'culture' in ELT.

What is an 'Intercultural' Approach to Second Language Education?

Since the mid to late 1980s, a number of teachers and educationalists have been arguing that an 'intercultural approach' to second language teaching prompts us to re-examine the most basic assumptions about what language does, and what a language course should seek to achieve. Current 'communicative' methods of second language teaching generally view language as a means of bridging an 'information gap'. Communicative language learning also assumes that by bridging a series of information gaps, learners will 'naturally' develop their linguistic knowledge and skills, ultimately to the point where they will acquire native-speaker competence. This view of language and linguistic development has tended to underrate culture. Stern (1992: 206) notes that, despite a sustained and consistent body of work, particularly in America, drawing attention to the importance of culture in language teaching, 'the cultural component has remained difficult to accommodate in practice'. In fact, cultural content was often stripped from learning materials. Pulverness (1996: 7) says of English language teaching (ELT) in the 1970s:

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 1970s and much of the 1980s, syllabus design and materials writing were driven by needs analysis, and culture was subordinated to performance objectives.

However, more recently, there have been fresh attempts to integrate 'culture' into the communicative curriculum. While acknowledging the obvious importance of language as a means of communicating information, advocates of an intercultural approach also emphasise its social functions; for example, the ways in which language is used by speakers and writers to negotiate their place in social groups and hierarchies. It has long been evident that the ways in which these negotiations take place vary from community to community. A language course concerned with 'culture', then, broadens its scope from a focus on improving the 'four skills' of reading, writing, listening and speaking, in order to help learners acquire cultural skills, such as strategies for the systematic observation of behavioural patterns. Moreover, as learners come to a deeper understanding of how the target language is used to achieve the explicit and implicit cultural goals of the foreign language community, they should be prompted to reflect on the ways in which their own language and community functions. The intercultural learner ultimately serves as a mediator between different social groups that use different languages and language varieties.

The ultimate goal of an intercultural approach to language education is not so much 'native speaker competence' but rather an 'intercultural communicative competence' (e.g. Byram, 1997b; Guilherme, 2002). Intercultural communicative competence includes the ability to understand the language and behaviour of the target community, and explain it to members of the 'home' community – and vice versa. In other words, an intercultural approach trains learners to be 'diplomats', able to view different cultures from a perspective of informed understanding. This aim effectively displaces the long-standing, if seldom achieved, objective of teaching learners to attain 'native speaker proficiency'. Obviously, one key goal of an intercultural approach remains language development and improvement; however, this goal is wedded to the equally important aim of intercultural understanding and mediation.

English language teaching has long been a multidisciplinary field in practice, but it has drawn mainly upon research into linguistics and psychology for its theoretical insights. An intercultural approach continues to draw upon these disciplines, but gives equal weight to other areas of research and practice in the humanities and social sciences. Some of these disciplines, such as anthropology and literary studies, are well established; others, such as media and cultural studies, are relatively young and still developing. Since the theoretical frameworks that have stimulated intercultural approaches are diverse, and potentially bewildering, much of the remainder of this chapter seeks to summarise them and clarify their contribution.

Much recent work on the intercultural approach to second language education has been done in state schools and colleges, particularly in Europe, and in courses and seminars sponsored by state institutions such as the British Council. An intercultural approach has been slower to impact upon ELT in the commercial sector. The commercial sector clearly is not motivated by exactly the same ideological considerations that govern state education. Modern languages education in state schools usually has to conform to goals that explicitly embed foreign language teaching in a broader humanistic curriculum. For example, a Working Group preparing modern language teachers in England and Wales for a revised national curriculum defined the curricular aims of modern languages teaching in a manner wholly in accord with the goals of an intercultural approach. The Working Group proposed that learners should have the opportunity to:

• appreciate the similarities and differences between their own and cultures of the communities/countries where the target language is spoken;

• identify with the experience and perspective of people in the countries and communities where the target language is spoken;

• use this knowledge to develop a more objective view of their own customs and ways of thinking. (DES, 1990: 3, cited in Byram et al., 1994: 15)

Such goals are more likely to be part of a liberal state-sponsored educational curriculum than a commercially driven one. However, there are benefits for the commercial sector in adopting and possibly adapting aspects of an intercultural approach. The skills of social observation and explanation that are taught in the intercultural classroom give a coherent rationale for the teaching of the traditional 'four skills'. Communicative language teaching has always demanded that classroom activities have a purpose. An intercultural approach gives teachers and learners a clearly defined and consistent set of purposes. Furthermore, while a fully developed intercultural approach, as such, has not yet been systematically or widely adopted by commercial language schools, many English language teachers will nevertheless recognise in the contents of this book aspects of what they already do. Many teachers have a long-standing interest in cultural activities, and their interests and individual experience of some of the 'tributary disciplines' of the intercultural approach (such as literary or media studies) no doubt will have led them to adopt some of the practices described in this book. Indeed, most English language teachers will recognise the possibilities afforded by the intercultural approach as an extension of their current methods, and a reexamination of the rationale governing them. The intercultural approach does not seek to replace or undermine the advances made by task-based learning or learner-centred curricula (see, for example, Nunan, 1988; Willis, 1996 and the various contributions to Carter & Nunan, 2001). Rather, it seeks to build on these advances, and to channel them towards useful and realistic goals. Few learners achieve 'native speaker' linguistic competence. Many, however, can achieve the valuable skills of observation, explanation and mediation that contribute to 'intercultural' communicative competence (cf. Byram 1997b).

This book recognises the wide diversity of English language teaching throughout the world, and consequently does not seek to detail a single, all-purpose approach to meet all situations and requirements. Over the past few decades, there rightly has been a suspicion of 'one size fits all' approaches to second language education. Charges of 'linguistic imperialism' have been brought against those who impose competence in English as a prerequisite to access to broader education (cf. Pennycook, 1994; Phillipson, 1992). Critics argue that the adoption of 'English through English' policies in certain contexts encourages economic and educational dependence on textbooks and teachers from anglophone countries. The adoption of an intercultural approach cannot hope to equalise the patterns of economic domination and subordination that characterise international relations. Nevertheless, its reflective stance can encourage learners to be critically aware of the roles that different languages play in their lives. The intercultural element of this kind of second language education also requires teachers and learners to pay attention to and respect the home culture and the home language. Learning materials have to incorporate aspects of the home culture, and nonnative teachers become particularly valued for their own ability to move between the home and target cultures.

This book, then, does not provide a series of 'ready to use recipes' for those wishing to adopt an intercultural approach. It offers instead a systematic outline of the main principles of an intercultural approach, an 'intellectual history' of the influences upon it, and some practical examples of how to implement an intercultural approach in ways that complement current 'communicative' practices. To begin, we shall consider the main research disciplines that have provided insights into intercultural language education.

Tributary Disciplines

'Culture' is the object of study of a range of different research disciplines. For example, anthropology investigates in general how membership of a particular social group is related to particular sets of behaviour; ethnography seeks, partly through structured exposure to other cultures, to explore and describe how the speech systems and behaviours of groups are related to their social structures and beliefs; and cultural studies seeks to understand and interpret the way that members of a group represent themselves through their cultural products (whether those products are poems, songs, dances, graffiti, or sports events). Each of these disciplines has its own intellectual history and methodology, and each alone easily constitutes an entire university programme. From the perspective of the intercultural approach, they can be thought of as 'tributary' disciplines, each shaping the practices and concerns of the intercultural classroom and intercultural courses. To make sense of their contributions to ELT it is worth summarising some of the arguments about culture found in the main 'tributary disciplines', that is, the various branches of linguistic, anthropological and cultural studies. These summaries should be understood as thumbnail sketches, intended to give general points of reference in a complex set of discussions.

Linguistics

English language teaching is generally considered a branch of applied linguistics: in ELT, linguistic knowledge is not sought for its own sake but in order to facilitate the more effective teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Linguistics 'proper' has a different set of disciplinary objectives from ELT. It would, in fact, be a mistake to assume that linguists such as grammarians, discourse analysts, phoneticians and phonologists, all have a similar set of objectives. Given the diversity of their interests, we would expect linguists to disagree to some extent about the primary goals of linguistic investigations and the methods of gathering and validating evidence. For example, some linguists consider native speaker intuitions about language to be the primary source of valid data, while others prefer to collate and analyse large computerised data archives of what other people have written and uttered. Most academic disciplines are characterised by arguments about priorities and methodology – in linguistics one of the sources of dispute is about the status of culture and its relationship to language.

Linguistics in North America

In North America, formal linguists have tended to abstract language from its social and cultural context. The structural linguists who followed Bloomfield (1933) were interested in devising systematic procedures that would first break the sentence down, constituent by constituent, until its smallest grammatical components were discovered, and then would explore the relations holding between the different constituents. The transformational-generative linguists who followed Chomsky (1957) are more concerned with devising rules for the generation of sentences, arguing that such a set of rules models human grammatical knowledge. Both Bloomfield's and Chomsky's theories of grammar have influenced ELT theory and practice. Structuralist theories of language combined with behaviourist psychology to produce the audiolingual method in ELT. The audiolingual curriculum was organised according to increasingly complex grammatical constructions, and learners were drilled in these constructions in the hope that they would form the habit of producing grammatically correct utterances. This method held sway from about the 1950s to the 1970s. Following Chomsky's criticism of both the behaviourist theories of learning and structuralist theories of language, audiolingualism gave way to the communicative approach, the preferred set of approaches from the early 1980s to the present day. Linguistic theory became much more cognitively oriented, and attention was directed towards how learners' 'interlanguage' could be understood and its development supported.

Formal linguistics in the traditions of Bloomfield and Chomsky made a deep, if at times indirect, impact upon ELT, first in audiolingualism, and later in cognitive models of second language acquisition. However, the communicative approach was never as monolithic as audiolingualism, and it has also been susceptible to different linguistic approaches. In particular, speech act theory, developed by Searle (1969) from the British linguist, Austin's (1962) study, also influenced early communicative curricula that attempted to redefine language as a taxonomy of notions and functions (cf. Wilkins, 1976). For the moment, however, it is sufficient to note that communicative language teaching has been influenced by Chomsky's view of language as a cognitive faculty that allows humans to develop an internalised model of the target language through exposure to it and interaction with its speakers. Instead of doing language drills, learners are encouraged to develop language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) through tasks that involve interaction with 'authentic' written and spoken texts. Although it might be supposed that interaction with authentic texts might encourage cultural exploration, the communicative approach focused instead on the transfer of information as the core of the language-learning task. Interaction between speakers and with texts concentrated on this aspect of communicative behaviour, and, as the structure drill had been the typical classroom activity of the audiolingual method, so the information-gap activity became the heart of the archetypal task in the communicative classroom (cf. Breen & Littlejohn, 2000; Nunan, 1989).

Cultural exploration was not considered essential to the theories of language and language acquisition that influenced either audiolingualism or cognitive approaches to second language learning. For example, Stephen Pinker (1994: 18–19) writes in his popular account of linguistics:

Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year old ... isa grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics approach.

From Pinker's point of view, language is not a cultural construct but the result of a long process of biological evolution – it is an instinct that is no more or less remarkable than the instincts which allow bats to navigate at night or migratory birds to fly home (Pinker, 1994: 19). Pinker, like Chomsky before him, is interested in language organisation and development as a universal phenomenon. They are less interested in asking why a particular person produces a particular utterance on a given occasion. Nevertheless, the question is significant, since we also use language partly to construct and maintain group identity, and to establish and negotiate social norms of belief, attitude and value. Particular linguistic choices therefore come imbued with cultural significance, and this relationship is a valid area of investigation. As we shall shortly see, it has been a valid area of investigation even in America, when interest in language has overlapped with an interest in anthropology.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Foreword; Acknowledgements 1. An Intercultural Approach To Second Language Education; 2. Implementing an Intercultural Approach; 3. Culture and Conversational English 4. Culture and Written Genres; 5. Ethnographic Approaches to Culture and Language; 6. Exploring Culture through Interviews; 7. Developing Visual Literacy; 8. Using Literary, Media and Cultural Studies; 9. Assessing Intercultural Communication; 10. Prospects for Teaching and Learning Language and Culture. References Index