Language and Culture

In my keynote talk this morning I mentioned the twenty-first century sociological focus on language, looking at language as the glue which holds a society together, as the paint box from which a society creates its own particular reality, as the means whereby a society invents its own story and then proceeds to live it. In this session, I want to look more closely at the implications this viewpoint on language has for our language teaching classrooms. I want to look at culture, try to agree a definition of it, ask where culture belongs in our classrooms, and explore ways in which we might be able to teach it.

Since the worldwide rise of nationhood in the nineteenth century, from its beginnings in Europe in the seventeenth, the commonest unit of social grouping has been through nationality. Today you are all Lebanese, a century or two ago, in common with many other peoples of this region, you would have been citizens of the Ottoman Empire. Today I am Scottish, twenty years or so ago, I would have considered myself British, a few centuries ago, I would have been a member of a small tribe on the Celtic fringe of Northern Europe. Most of us in the modern world define ourselves by nationality, although each nation contains many sub-groups, and each nation also belongs to larger regional, cultural, religious or linguistic groupings.

Nationhood has been viewed (Vadim Volkan) as similar to a tent, providing security and comradeship for all its members, a commonality of shelter for all within. Access to a foreign language means being able to lift the flap of your own tent and look into someone else’s. As language teachers we are able to provide our students with this privilege, allowing them to peer out and look into other tents, enabling them at some stage in their lives to enter those other tents and mingle with their inhabitants. The cliched old phrase of “broadening horizons” hardly does justice to such an exciting gift. For if we lift that tent flap with a sense of awe and wonder, if we instill in our students a sense of curiosity about and respect for these guys in the next tent, we open up the possibilities of new worlds for them, not just broader horizons on the old.

Indeed, it is vital that we do not simply let our students assume that these guys in the next tent are the same as us, but have a different way of speaking. Or that these guys are not worthy of interest in themselves, but their language is quite useful for getting a job in business or tourism. Why? Because, in an increasingly crowded, fast-moving world, where modern transport and communications bring us face-to-face with guys from other tents at a rate of frequency hitherto unknown in human history, we all need to know who we are dealing with as we navigate our way through our increasingly complex, fragmented and episodic lives. And that means not just speaking the language of the other group, but understanding their culture.

What is culture?

But what exactly do we mean by culture? One famous definition is that “Culture is what we do, and the monkeys don’t”. That may be arguable, but it certainly isn’t sufficient as a definition. Any offers for a definition of culture?

                           (Get key words from definitions offered)

Here are some reputable dictionary definitions:

   - the behaviours and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic or age 
     group.
   - the totality of socially transmitted behaviour patterns
   - the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and 
      transmitted from one generation to the next
   - the predominant attitudes and behaviour that characterize the functioning of
     a group

Note the key points: culture is social group-specific; it includes both beliefs and behaviours, i.e. mental constructs and physical, observable manifestations of these; it is transmitted inter-generationally, and is thus a body of learned behaviours and attitudes.

Here is UNESCO’s definition of culture, published in 2002:
“the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, encompassing art, literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs”.
Has anything been left out here? This definition seems to follow the tradition of the comprehensive listing of “cultural objects” favored by some social anthropologists. Indeed, one such approach to culture has listed well over 170 “cultural objects”, including a law, a tool, a marriage, and so on.

Rather than listing what culture consists of, sociologists have tended to focus on the relationship between our cultures and ourselves. Thus culture is seen as “shared schematic experience”, a schema being essentially a conceptual framework or worldview; or “webs of significance that give regularity and unity to the practices of a group”. This sense of culture as our understanding of the complex network of reality that the universe presents us with is evident in this wonderfully poetic definition from sociology: “Culture is a set of mechanisms for survival, but provides us also with a definition of reality. It is the matrix into which we are born; it is the anvil upon which our persons and destinies are forged”. (Robert Murphy).

Whereas the dictionary definitions of culture seem to refer to some static body of learned behaviours and attitudes, the sociological definitions account for something infinitely more dynamic and more complex. For essentially, culture is a system of symbols and meanings that have no fixed boundaries. They are open to negotiation, which is why you can get so many varied opinions and viewpoints on and within the same culture. The system is thus constantly in flux, as different sub-groups of society interact and compete with one another to have their values and behaviours accepted and prioritized. The notion of some tidy set of beliefs and rituals being passed down from one generation to the next, which comes over in the dictionary definitions of culture, is replaced by a more dynamic, creative, chaotic, unpredictable, and complicated process. For culture as the lifeblood of a society is subject to both pressures for change and to more conservative pressures for maintenance of the status quo. It is subject to the forces of creation and of destruction. It is continually shifting and evolving. And in our modern world, given the way in which developments in globalization, migration, telecommunications and transport, are affecting social groupings, it is having to evolve at a faster rate than ever before in human history.

Where does Culture Belong in the Language Classroom?

Now, let’s bring all this theorizing a bit closer to home. Let’s look at the place of culture in the language classroom. And let me start by saying I assume I do not have to argue that the teaching of culture has a place in the language classroom. It is quite simply not possible to teach language without culture, since language is part of culture, as well as the means whereby culture is created.

The very fact that English has only one form of “you” while French has “tu” and “vous” says something about the cultures of these respective societies. The  fact that Inuit Eskimo languages famously boast dozens of terms for types of snow, whereas English can only muster a few, gives some indication of the cultures behind these languages. The richness of kinship terms in a language like Serbian, by contrast to the smaller repertoire of such terms in English, equally contrasts the cultures of these two societies in terms of the human relationships that are played out in  them. A study of idioms and proverbs in any language will give strong clues to the kind of society they arise from. And every language boasts a number of unique terms and expressions which are simply untranslatable from one language to another without losing some essential component of their original meaning.

Turning to grammar, the fact that the American Indian Hopi language possesses no category of tense whatsoever, reveals a culture with a very different notion of and attitude to time than western culture displays. The Australian aboriginal Dyirbal language demonstrates a very different worldview from our own by possessing four gender categories for nouns: masculine, feminine, neuter, and a sort of god-like, mythological creature gender. Another aboriginal language, Timithir, has no equivalent of left, right, front, back, and so on. Directions are absolute rather than relative, and you would say “He is standing south west of his sister” rather than “He is standing to the left of his sister”. What a fascinating perception of reality that does not have the speaker at its centre! An Amazonian Indian language, Piraha, has no colour terms, no numbers, no quantifiers, indeed, very few of the grammatical and lexical categories we take for linguistically granted, revealing a living-in-the-moment culture with no need for abstractions of any sort.

And at the discourse level too, culture shines through the language for those prepared to look for it. When the French string language together, it often seems to be used for decorative more than clarification purposes. The recognized stylistic traits of hyperbole and exaggeration in Arabic can be seen as reflecting the underlying cultural values of expansiveness and generosity. The equally recognized, though lately not so commonly found, stylistic traits of understatement in English similarly point up underlying cultural values, in this case the modesty and stoicism held in such esteem by a previous generation.

So, even teaching language as a code, with no ostensible reference to culture, will reveal insights about the culture behind that language for those ready to see them. However, culture usually does make some official appearances in the language classroom, more often than not as an afterthought, something additional to, and almost peripheral to, the central business of teaching the language. Most language teaching textbooks will have units dealing with food and restaurants, with shopping, with cinema or theatre visiting, with public transport use, with the celebration of festivals, and so on. At more advanced levels, material will be available on political and education systems in the target culture, or the more specialized spheres of business and economics, science and medicine. This is all presented, through published materials or carefully collected realia, as cultural knowledge, as information about the culture of the target language.

I would suggest that there are serious problems with this approach to culture. Firstly, by the time it’s in a textbook, it’s bound to be outdated: culture really is changing that quickly these days. Secondly, because it’s outdated and because it’s a mono-view, presenting one set of perceptions, the textbook writer‘s, there will be a tendency to stereotyping. And thirdly, because it relies on explanation rather than experience, it does nothing to develop cultural awareness, a sensitivity to difference, an internally developed sense that will set your students up for modern life  better than a whole mass of given cultural information will.

For cultural awareness involves understanding the values which lie at the core of another culture, and appreciating their difference from one’s own core values. Cultural awareness permits successful intercultural encounters, removing the obstacles of false expectations or mistaken  assumptions. Cultural  awareness implies knowing where the guys in the other tent are coming from, and knowing just where you are coming from yourself. Cultural awareness, as an open, non-judgmental, positive approach to speakers of other languages, citizens of other nations, is not only the way forward for your students if they are to enjoy happy, harmonious, and successful lives in the modern world; it is the only way forward for all of us in the international community if we are to bequeath our children a peaceful and prosperous world.

Moreover, I would suggest that a focus on cultural awareness, as opposed to simply cultural knowledge, brings culture into a more deserving central position in the language classroom. For this focus can be a great motivator, bringing into play not just our innate curiosity about what makes other people tick, but, more importantly, our even stronger curiosity about ourselves. Discovering, exploring and understanding the assumptions, values and attitudes of another culture, necessarily involves discovering, exploring and understanding our own assumptions, values and attitudes, all of which are usually held unconsciously throughout most people’s lifetimes. And self-discovery through discovery of others is a pretty exciting and motivating syllabus component for any classroom.
 

Teaching Cultural Awareness

Once again, let’s move from theory to practice. Cultural awareness, yes, great stuff, but just how exactly do we go about it? First of all, what resources are available for teaching it? Well, for all the reasons already given, textbooks are pretty much out, with their tendencies to stereotyping and out-of-date-ness. Similarly, the native-speaker, if he or she has spent the last ten or fifteen years teaching English outside their own country, is equally out. They may have an excellent command of their language as a system, but will no longer be so adept with their language as a socio-cultural phenomenon, since they will have lost touch with the fast-moving dynamics of the native culture. Native citizens are fine, people like me who have just popped out of their society for a few weeks. They know what is going on in their culture at the minute, though their view of it will obviously be coloured by the age, gender, ethnic, educational, political, religious and interest groupings they belong to within that culture.

Apart from native citizens, often a rare commodity in language classrooms, we obviously have recourse to the media, that twenty first century equivalent to the village well, where gossip is generated and opinions are formed. Newspapers and magazines all have e-versions these days, so printing  off articles, front pages and pictures for classroom use has never been easier. With the rising number of cable and satellite channels, increasing numbers of current English-medium television programmes are available, and can be recorded for classroom use or downloaded from internet sites. TV commercials, currently popular sitcoms, comedy programmes, news broadcasts and current affairs programmes are all rich in potential for cultural awareness-raising. The world-wide web itself, with its wealth of opinion forums, chat rooms and social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo, provides a first-hand opportunity for engaging in intercultural interaction and enables cultural encounters for your students. And mirrors to contemporary culture can also be found in the arts world, in recent films and up-to-date literature, and in recognized modern art icons, like Damien Hurst’s famous diamond skull.

The material is all there, easily available and readily accessible. The challenge is to get your students to react to it and to think about their reactions. There are several ways of going about this.  You can ask them to compare and contrast, say, attitudes and behaviours surrounding marriage in their own or the target culture; or national heroes for the Americans and for the Lebanese; or the place in society given to old people in Britain and in Lebanon. Such exercises can start out as fact-finding and research, but develop into emotional reaction and an examination and discussion of that emotional reaction. Or you can present students with a culturally loaded “critical experience”, say through a television commercial which they might find shocking or distasteful, or a joke which they simply do not understand or find funny, or a piece of behaviour or written text which they find rude, and get them to examine why they react in that way to the material presented, to appreciate that people from another culture might react differently, and to understand why those people would react differently. Or you can start from a basis of unpacking the stereotypes students already have in their heads regarding the target culture, simply asking them, working in pairs or groups, to list the main differences they think exist between, say,  their own and American culture. Such a basic exercise can be very revealing, and gives you a good starting point for planning any future work on cultural awareness.

For the content of cultural awareness work has to be tailored pretty much to your own particular group of students. You may decide to work to some sort of syllabus geared to the experiences of everyday living such as food, travel, shopping, clothing and so on; or to the more universal experiences of life such as birth, death, friendship, marriage, work.  You may choose a more random and eclectic series of topics, articles, pictures and activities to stimulate your students. The path you take is largely  irrelevant. What is important is that your students are provided with some stimulus that allows them to examine their reactions to different modes of behaviour, to different attitudes and values. What matters is that they are given the opportunity to develop a tolerance of cultural discrepancy. And what counts is that they are able to do this in a classroom where the teacher is a tolerant moderator and mediator, not the sole provider of information, nor an arbiter of what is right or wrong.

Group Task