Teaching Culture In The EFL/ESL Classroom
1Running head: Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomTeaching Culture in the EFL/ESL ClassroomTran-Hoang-ThuAlliant International UniversitySan Diego, CaliforniaSeptember 11th 2010Paper presented at The Los Angeles Regional California Teachers of English to Speakers ofOther Languages, Fullerton, California, September 11th 2010.
2Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomAbstractThis article is intended to discuss prominent issues in teaching culture to second and foreignlanguage students. The concepts of language and culture will be defined, respectively. Next, thecharacteristics and components of culture will be presented. In addition, commonly used terms inlanguage and culture including enculturation, acculturation, cultural awareness, cross-culturalawareness, cultural identity, culture shock, and culture bump will be discussed, compared andcontrasted. The relationship between language and culture will also be pointed out. Moreover,factors such as teachers, curricula, and textbooks that have an impact on the success and failureof teaching culture to second and foreign language students will be examined. Besides, variousviews on culture in language learning will be explored. The hidden assumptions of culturelearning and teaching when language teachers embrace the bandwagon of communicativelanguage teaching approach will be addressed. Additionally, techniques for teaching culturalawareness and ways to integrate culture learning into the foreign and second languageclassrooms will too be described. Furthermore, some practical guidelines on accounting forcultural issues for language classroom teachers will be indicated. The advantages anddisadvantages of teaching culture in the language classroom will be mentioned. Finally, somediscussion and conclusion will be made.
3Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomIntroductionIn this era of information and technology explosion, peoples in the world come intocontact with one another more often and more easily than ever before. The need for mastering aforeign or second language besides one‟s own seems to dramatically grow. More people arelearning languages for their personal and professional needs. Although the field of languageteaching has done an excellent job to increasingly better accommodate the needs of languagelearners, the field may have to do even more and better to address the various needs of languagelearners. Specifically, cultural aspects of the language being learned must be taught concurrentlywith the linguistic aspects, which have traditionally been emphasized.Teaching culture to foreign or second language students may not be a novel topic, as ithas repeatedly been discussed by a whole host of authors such as Atkinson (1999), Blatchford(1986), Brown (1986), Brown (2007a), Brown and Eisterhold (2004), Brooks (1986), Damen(1987), Morgan and Cain (2000), Tang (1999), Tang (2006), Valdes (1986), to name but a few.However, after decades of development in language teaching, one might wonder if culture hasincreasingly become an important component in the language curriculum as well as in thetraining programs for language teachers. Likewise, it may not be clear if researchers and authorsin language teaching are still interested in finding out effective methods to integrate culture insecond and foreign language classrooms. To that end, this paper attempts to partially shed somelight on this issue.Before any discussion on the relationship between language and culture can be carriedout, it is first necessary to discuss some common terms such as language, culture, enculturation,
4Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomacculturation, culture awareness, cross-cultural awareness, cultural identity, culture bump, andculture shock. An understanding of these basic terms will enable one to realize the importance ofculture in language learning and teaching.What is language?Language has been around since human beings started to communicate with one anotherfor their daily life needs. The term language is so familiar that few people would ever try todefine it. It is superficially not hard to define it, but in fact to have a comprehensive definition oflanguage is an extremely daunting task. Definitions for language run the gamut from very simpleto extremely complex. Patrikis (1988) simply defined language as signs that convey meanings.Language is also “a system of signs that is seen as having itself a cultural value” (Kramsch,1998, p. 3). From a linguistic perspective, Sapir (1968), a renowned linguist, defined language asan entirely human and non-intrinsic method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires bymeans of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. Generally speaking, language can beregarded as a system of verbal and nonverbal signs used to express meanings. Besides language,another closely related concept that is sometimes mentioned in the literature of languageteaching is culture.What is culture?One of the well-known definitions of culture is Goodenough‟s (1957). a society‟s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order tooperate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any role that they acceptfor any one of themselves (p. 167).
5Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomBrown (2007), however, defined culture as a way of life, as the context within whichpeople exist, think, feel, and relate to others, as the “glue” (p. 188) that binds groups of peopletogether. Moreover, culture, as Brown (2007) suggested, can also be defined as the ideas,customs, skills, arts, and tools that characterize a certain group of people in a given period oftime. Sowden (2007) indicated that “culture tended to mean that body of social, artistic, andintellectual traditions associated historically with a particular social, ethnic or national group”(pp. 304-305). Additionally, Mead (1961) postulated that culture can be learned, whereas Fox(1999) noted that “culture is relative and changeable in space and time” (p. 90). Like language,culture may seem to be another concept that is not easy to define. In fact, Tang (2006) rightlyobserved that despite the continued efforts in various disciplinary fields to find a definition forthe term culture, at the present time there is no single definition that satisfies everyone.According to the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning (1996), culture istypically understood to include the philosophical perspectives, the behavioral practices, and bothtangible and intangible products of a society. The relationship between perspectives, practices,and products within culture is illustrated below.Figure 1: What constitutes culture? (The National Standards for Foreign Language Learning,1996, p. 43)Perspectives(Meanings, attitudes, values, ideas)Practices(Patterns of social interactions)Products(Books, tools, foods, laws, music, games)
6Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomWhat are the characteristics and components of culture?Although the task of defining culture may be difficult, it appears that characteristics andcomponents of culture can be identified. Damen (1987) presented six notable characteristics ofculture.1. Culture is learned.2. Cultures and cultural patterns change.3. Culture is a universal fact of human life.4. Cultures provide sets of unique and interrelated, selected blueprints for living andaccompanying sets of values and beliefs to support these blueprints.5. Language and culture are closely related and interactive.6. Culture functions as a filtering device between its bearers and the great range of stimulipresented by the environment.Additionally, Damen (1987) also suggested that culture can be examined from the pointof view of its individual components (such as dress, systems of rewards and punishments, uses oftime and space, fashions of eating, means of communication, family relationships, beliefs andvalues), or from the more social point of view of its systems (such as kinship, education,economy, government association, and health). However, Nieto (2002, p. 10) postulated that“culture is complex and intricate; it cannot be reduced to holidays, foods, or dances, althoughthese are of course elements of cultures.”
7Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomWhat are these concepts: enculturation, acculturation, cultural awareness, cross-culturalawareness, cultural identity, culture bump, and culture shock?Enculturation and acculturationIn discussion of culture and culture learning, the two terms enculturation andacculturation are commonly used. Whereas the acquisition of a first culture is calledenculturation, the acquisition of a second or additional culture is termed acculturation, and bothexhibit unique variations (Damen, 1987). Similarly, Brown (1986) defined acculturation as theprocess of becoming adapted to a new culture. In addition, Damen (1987) clearly delineatedenculturation and acculturation as follows:Enculturation builds a sense of cultural or social identity, a network of values and beliefs,patterned ways of living, and, for the most part, ethnocentrism, or belief in the power andthe rightness of native ways. Acculturation, on the other hand, involves the process ofpulling out the world view or ethos of the first culture, learning new ways of meeting oldproblems, and shedding ethnocentric evaluations” (p. 140).Cultural awareness and cross-cultural awarenessAnother term worthy of discussion is cultural awareness. Cortazzi and Jin (1999) pointedout that cultural awareness means to become aware of members of another cultural groupincluding their behavior, their expectations, their perspectives and values. Kuang (2007)delineated four levels of cultural awareness. At the first level, people are aware of their ways ofdoing things, and their way is the only way. They ignore the influence of cultural differences.People become aware of other ways of doing things at the second level, but they still see theirway as the best. Cultural differences at this level are deemed as a source of problems, and people
8Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomare likely to ignore the problems or reduce their importance. People at the third level of culturalawareness are aware of both their way of doing things and others‟ ways of doing things, and theytend to choose the best way according to the situation. At the third level, people come to realizethat cultural differences can lead to problems as well as benefits, and are willing to use culturaldiversity to generate new solutions and alternatives. Finally, at the fourth level, people fromvarious cultural backgrounds are brought together to create a culture of shared meanings. Peopleat this level repeatedly dialogue with others, and create new meanings and rules to meet theneeds of a specific situation. In essence, it can be said that individuals who experience the fourlevels of cultural awareness proposed by Kuang (2007) move from a stage of “culturalignorance” to a stage of “cultural competence.”Krasner (1999) mentioned a three-step process of internalizing culture that was proposedby Agar (1994): mistake, awareness, and repair. Generally, step one, mistake, is when somethinggoes wrong; step two, awareness, is when the learners know the frame of the new culture andpossible alternatives; step three, repair, is when learners try to adjust to the new culture. Acritical goal of culture teaching in foreign language teaching, as Krasner postulated, is raisingstudents‟ awareness about the target culture.Like cultural awareness, cross-cultural awareness, as Damen (1987) indicated, involvesdiscovering and understanding one‟s own culturally conditioned behavior and thinking, as wellas the patterns of others. It is also “the force that moves a culture learner across the acculturationcontinuum from a state of no understanding of, or even hostility to, a new culture to near totalunderstanding, from monoculturalism, to bi- or multi-culturalism” (Damen, 1987, p. 141). In asimilar vein, intercultural communication is defined as acts of communication undertaken by
9Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomindividuals identified with groups exhibiting intergroup variation in shared social and culturalpatterns (Damen, 1987). Citing from Rich and Ogawa (1982), Damen remarked that the termintercultural communication has had different names such as cross-cultural communication,transcultural communication, interracial communication, international communication, andcontracultural communication. Zhang (2007) argued that having the proper awareness of crosscultural communication is the first step to achieve harmony and success of interculturalcommunication.Cultural identity, culture shock, and culture bumpSome other culturally related terms include cultural identity, culture shock, and culturebump. Damen (1987) noted that cultural identity is associated with the relationship between theindividual and society, and it is at stake when the process of acculturation is under way, becauseto become bicultural is to develop an altered cultural personality and identity. Kramer (1994)indicated that foreign language learning is a hermeneutic process where learners expose theirown cultural identity to the contrasting influences of a foreign language and culture.Culture shock which is a common experience for a person learning a second language ina second culture refers to the phenomena ranging from mild irritating to deep psychologicalpanic and crisis (Brown, 1986, 2007). In terms of the origin of the term, Damen (1987) pointedout that it was coined in 1958 by Oberg who suggested that it resulted from anxiety over losingfamiliar signs and symbols. Damen further indicated that culture shock is an intermediate stagein the acculturative process, and is particularly painful as it follows an initial period of euphoriaand joy at the new and strange. Culture shock may endure for some, whereas for others it is
10Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomquickly followed by a devastating period of depression, dislike of the new and strange, illness,discouragement, and despair (Damen, 1987).Using Pederson (1995) as a guide, Brown and Eisterhold (2004) described the classicmodel of culture shock as a U-shape curve of five stages.1. The honeymoon stage2. The disintegration stage3. The reintegration stage4. The autonomy stage5. The interdependence stageTo further explicate what each stage means, Brown and Eisterhold (2004) stated that inthe first stage, the honeymoon stage, the differences observed in the new culture are exciting andattractive. The second stage, the disintegration stage, is a period of frustration and helplessness.The new culture appears overwhelming in this period, and the response of the newcomer istypically depression or withdrawal. In the reintegration stage, culture appears to be a problem,and the newcomer is defensive, not responsive. The newcomer in the autonomy stage hasperspective on the culture, and his or her opinions are balanced, objective, and may indeed berelatively positive. Finally, some people attain the interdependence stage when they adopt a newidentity as a bicultural or multicultural person.Unlike culture shock, culture bump, as Archer (1986) noted, occurs when a person fromone culture finds himself or herself in a different, strange, or uncomfortable situation wheninteracting with people of a different culture. Archer posited that such a phenomenon results
11Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomfrom a difference in the way people from one culture behave in a certain situation from those inanother culture. Moreover, a culture bump, as Archer indicated, also happens when a person hasexpectations of one behavior and gets something completely different; and an individual does nothave to leave one‟s own culture in order to experience a culture bump. Whereas culture shockextends over an extended period of time, culture bumps are instantaneous, usually over withinminutes or even seconds, but the effect may be long-lasting, and can occur any time anindividual is in contact with members of another culture (Archer, 1986). This author maintainedthat culture bumps provide a good chance for international educators, as they lead both teachersand students to an awareness of self as a cultural being and provide an opportunity for skilldevelopment in extrapolating one cultural influence on everyday life, expressing feelingssuccessfully in a cross-cultural situation, and observing behavior. Archer also suggested thatalthough culture bumps can be negative, neutral, and positive, negative culture bumps shouldideally be eliminated.Jiang (2001) noted that for native English speaking teachers who work in English as aforeign language contexts culture bumps are inevitable, so whenever culture bumps occur, thoseteachers should use the incident as an opportunity to teach their own culture, since knowledgeobtained from experience tends to be more deeply rooted than from books. Culture bumps canhappen to anyone who is not familiar with a new culture; therefore, not only language studentsbut language teachers may also encounter such experiences which can turn out to be veryinstructive for teachers and students to discuss in the class.
12Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomWhat is the relationship between language and culture?Both language and culture are concepts that seem to have posed great difficulties forscholars to define. Besides, there seems to be an inevitable relationship between these twoconcepts. As Wardhaugh (2010) postulated, the nature of the relationship between language andculture has fascinated, and continues to fascinate people from a wide a variety of backgrounds.Shaul and Furbee (1998) stated that languages and cultures are systematic to a large degree, andare thus observable and describable. These authors added that whereas the systematic descriptionof language is called linguistics, the description of cultures is called ethnography. Furthermore,many authors have pointed out that language and culture are closely related (Ardila-Rey, 2008;Brown, 2007; Damen, 1987; Kuang, 2007; Kramsch, 1998; Tang, 1999). For example, ArdilaRey (2008) maintained that: “Language and culture are inextricably linked with each other” (p.335). Likewise, Brown (2007) pointed out the interrelatedness of language and culture:Language is a part of a culture, and culture is a part of the language; the two areintricately interwoven so that one cannot separate the two without losing the significanceof either language or culture. The acquisition of a second language, except forspecialized, instrumental acquisition (as may be the case, say, in acquisition of readingknowledge of a language for examining scientific texts), is also the acquisition of asecond culture” (pp. 189-190).In the same vein, Kramsch (1998) held that language is the main means whereby peopleconduct their social lives and when it is used in context of communication, it is bound up withculture in various and complex ways. Tang (1999) went even further by equating the concept oflanguage with that of culture. In other words, this author claimed that language is synonymouswith culture. Another author, however, considers one as the container of the other. Kuang (2007,p. 75) wrote: “Language is the carrier of culture and culture is the content of language.”
13Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroomLanguage is even regarded as the product of culture, as Muir (2007) asserted that language is justone of the various cultural products.Wardhaugh (2010) pinpointed three main claims concerning the relationship betweenlanguage and culture. First, it is claimed that the structure of a language determines the way inwhich speakers of that language view the world. Second, a relatively weaker version is that thestructure of a language does not determine the world-view, but it is still greatly influential inpredisposing speakers of a language toward adopting a particular world-view. Third, it
1 Running head: Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL classroom Teaching Culture in the EFL/ESL Classroom Tran-Hoang-Thu Alliant International University San Diego, California September 11th 2010 Paper presented at The Los Angel
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