Bridging the Culture Gap in the Classroom

Bridging the culture gap in the classroom

By Hugh Dellar

Hugh Dellar is a teacher and teacher trainer at University of Westminster, London. He is also the co-author or the five-level general English series, OUTCOMES and INNOVATIONS, both published by Heinle Cengage.

Just a brief look at how English is used is enough to suggest that CULTURE seems to permeate the way we process the world in a wide range of ways. We talk about arts and culture; we have the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; we discuss company cultures and youth culture and subcultures; we make generalizations about French or Spanish or Polish culture; we fret about high and low culture, popular culture and celebrity culture; we are told – at least in England, we are – that there's a culture of yobbishness and violence on our streets and that we live in a culture of greed and self-interest. We talk about things being part of – or not being part of – our culture. We debate cultural values, our cultural needs, cultural shifts and the cultural dominance of the USA.

And, of course, culture seems to have started permeating the way we think about our job as teachers of English as well. We're constantly told at conferences that we need to be thinking about culture when teaching language – and that without intercultural competence, whatever communicative competence students may develop is basically meaningless. Here are just some of the claims about the relationship between language and culture that I've heard being made at conferences over the last couple of years:

• Language without culture is like a finger without a body.
• Culture and language are intimately related. They go hand in hand during the teaching-learning process.
• Language and culture are not separate, but are acquired together, with each providing support for the development of the other.
• The person who learns language without learning culture risks becoming a fluent fool.

Now, I often feel with culture that the nearer we get to it, the more we look at it, the more elusive it becomes and the more it slips away from our grasp. I freely admit to finding much of the discourse around culture in language teaching both confused and confusing, and if I feel like that, as a native speaker supposedly steeped in the culture of the language and who teaches multi-lingual students in the UK, whatever that may mean, then how much more confusing must all of this be for the countless non-native teachers around the world, teaching predominantly monolingual groups who may well be using their English far more frequently with other non-natives than with natives?

What I want to do in this session is to explore a few key questions and suggest a few tentative answers. Firstly, I'd like to ask what is it we actually mean by culture anyway. There are thousands of differing definitions out there and I won't bore you with an overview of them. In pairs, though, I would like you just to discuss what YOU think CULTURE is.

In general, I think there are two main ways we can consider culture. One is culture as PRODUCT, where culture equals the arts – music, painting, the theatre, and so on – along with history, cuisine, festivals, etc. Seen from this view, here are a few images that one might see associated with Polish culture.

This is essentially a STATIC view of culture. Then there's thinking about culture as a PROCESS, with culture as social practices and processes. Culture in this light is a site of change and conflict and revolves around the variety of languages operating within a society – the language of gesture, of clothes, of sexuality, of race, of gender and so on – and the ways in which reality is represented or constructed through a range of communication divides. In this definition, of course, you can take PRODUCTS – a skinhead haircut, football, mobile phones, a crown, a cross – and read meanings into them through an analysis of their relationships with other products, with social participants and with the products themselves in past incarnations. Looked at this way, jokes, newspaper articles, myths, archetypes, TV shows, advertising, films, street art and so on all give you windows into a culture – none of them representing a REAL culture, but all of them driven by particular cultural agendas – the writer or teller's desire to perpetuate stereotypes in order to maintain order – as with woman driver jokes, etc. – to raise social consciousness, to whip up patriotism, to challenge long-held attitudes or stereotypes and so on. Seen this way, perhaps THESE images tell us something interesting about Poland.

Given all of this, some core points about culture surely emerge:

1Culture is not static. It is fluid and dynamic.

2Culture can basically mean almost anything and everything.

3The notion of unified national cultures is a myth. Everything is in dispute.

4With English, this is of course complicated by its status as global lingua franca

Now, before anyone here has an attack of rage, I should add that culture is clearly located geographically and nationally IN SOME WAYS, yet within that we'd do well to bear in mind the fact that we are all unique and we all participate in globalised cultures and orient ourselves to all of this as individuals in our own way. Ultimately, developing ourselves as inter-culturally competent and globally oriented people surely has to involve being able to word our own worlds – and being open to learning about the worlds of others – and of course this latter may involve rethinking our own assumptions, withholding judgments and becoming aware of the fact that the view contains the viewer. Realizing that we are all different, but we are also all the same.

I'll move on to consider what this might mean in the classroom in a while, but first I want to explore one more common assumption – that teaching English must automatically mean somehow also teaching the CULTURE of England or the UK – or of the people for whom English is a mother tongue.

I've gathered together a sample of linguistic items from a variety of big-selling global English coursebooks – Upper-Intermediate and Advanced level – and just in pairs, consider to what degree you feel they are CULTURALLY rooted; in other words, to what degree would they need to be explained with reference to specific cultural phenomenon of the UK – or US.

She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her.

I can't stand being the centre of attention.

I think I'm quite a level-headed sort of person.

Compulsory military service should be abolished.

I spent a lot of the holidays just roaming around the countryside, exploring.

She has no qualms about giving her child a head start.

That film has had a lot of hype.

They fell on hard times.

The kidnappers released him after his family agreed to pay a ransom of $100,000.

He swore under oath that he'd spent the evening at home.

Hold your breath and count to ten.

I had an interview for the job, but I blew it.

Now unless I'm missing something, there's absolutely no cultural baggage attached to these sentences and they can be explained with reference to wherever your students happen to be – or nowhere at all. This isn't to say that nothing in English ever requires cultural background information. Clearly to deal with any of these sentences here –

Shoom span a Balearic mix of Detroit techno, New York garage and Chicago house.

Nationalist murals started springing up in areas like the Falls Road when IRA inmates of the Maze prison began a hunger strike.

The NUT has long been run by hardcore members of the Loony Left.

you'd need to know a fair bit of unusual cultural information – but these ARE not – and should never be – EFL material, in much the same way as students don't need to know about presidents of the USA or the kings and queens of England.

Language can obviously be used to represent culture and sometimes certain phrases may even encode certain things that are more dominant in certain circumstances than others. Take for instance the phrase EVEN IF I SAY SO MYSELF and its close cousin EVEN IF YOU SAY SO YOURSELF. These are both relatively fixed expressions used to undercut oneself – or someone else – when you think there's some slightly big-headed boasting going on, and this may or may not be a 'cultural phenomenon'. Whilst these expressions may be interesting, they're really not what most students need to get better as speakers of English as a medium for international communication.

The main point here, though, is that while language can represent culture, it does NOT encode it. There is NO culturally correct way of doing things within English itself.

So what does all this mean for what we can –or should – be doing in our classrooms?

Well, it's pretty clear that the traditional concept of culture in English language teaching, which far too frequently involved facts and figures about Britain – though in reality this usually meant England, and a rarified upper-middle class slice of English cultural life at that – is no longer valid! The world has moved on from a time in which studentscould be sold visions of Windsor Castle and Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon and Stonehenge and perhaps given the occasional extract from Dickens or Shakespeare.

I think that for culture to work in the classroom, it has to be done with some basic principles in mind. It has to:

1be a two-way process

2be global in perspective

3include language

4allow space for the personal

Students are now in a situation where they are likely to travel and met people from many different corners of the world; they're also in a globalised world where they may be eating Japanese food, watching Mexican movies, listening to Swedish music, reading Danish novelists and so on. As such, the UK – or US – should receive no higher priority than anywhere else, though I guess we do always have to bear in mind the expectation of SOME students – and, perhaps, some parents and even teachers as well – that learning English WILL involve a focus on 'the homes' of the language.

In addition to this, though, is the more complex reality that the vast bulk of students around the world will nevertheless be learning their English in classes that are monolingual. I hesitate to add 'and mono-cultural' because the simple fact of sharing a nationality doesn't mean that students will necessarily share any particular thoughts or experiences or opinions. Students will operate across a range of micro-cultural worlds – or sub-cultures - unique to themselves. Indeed, in many ways, I think it's important for students to realize and to recognize the diversity and complexity of their own local and national cultures before they can hope to understand similar issues with regard to other nations and cultures.

That notwithstanding, it still remains the case that the real way students get to develop intercultural competence is to travel, meet people, build friendships and relationships with people from more radically different backgrounds to themselves than their classmates. Given this, if students are to get the chance to think about how they would represent their own realities to others from around the world, then the materials used in the classroom have a responsibility to bring the world to them. This means looking to use cultural products and processes from around the world partly to simply teach students about the world, but also – crucially – to provide points of comparison, to serve as a springboard for cross-cultural comparisons and evaluation. There needs to be, if you like, global input but local outcomes.

So let's explore some ways in which all of this can work in our classes. In an ideal situation, it should be possible to combine all of the areas I've just mentioned into one scheme of work. Let's look at both a reading and a listening that have cultural content from around the world, that focus on some useful language and that allow plenty of space for students to respond from both a national and an individual perspective. Both these examples are from a Pre-Intermediate book, so for A2 students moving towards B1. First up, a listening-based slot from a unit called EDUCATION.

As you can see, once the context has been set, there's initially a chance to start from where the students are at – and for the students to discuss their own feelings about different aspects of their own education system. Of course, while it asks them to think about which things are good about school in their country, what students will inevitably do is talk from their own experience – and this may well mean they disagree. You may wish to just briefly consider what your OWN responses to these would be – and compare them with a partner.

[Look at Exercise A]

Next students listen to the interview with Rebecca and process it for gist – and then process it in more detail. Finally, they hear Rebcca's father talking and process this for gist before finally having the chance to compare what they have heard with their own realities, to give their own opinions about what the dad says – and to voice their own thoughts and feelings about their own school system.

Finally, this all leads into some vocabulary that helps students discuss their own school experiences better next time around.

The language work can also precede culturally oriented texts, of course. Here's a lesson from a unit called Dates and History that begins with some core vocabulary for describing historical events. Again, the UK features, but certainly isn't the main focus of this particular lesson. That comes next and is introduced via a short text [exercise A] that moves into the main comprehension questions and the text itself.

There's then some grammar work that derives from the text and finally a task that has a local outcome again. With these kinds of tasks, there's obviously a large degree of flexibility in terms of how teachers exploit them. They can just be discussions in class time, with maybe some time built in for individual planning; they can be homeworks – with web searches encouraged – that lead into presentations; they can be blog entries on a class blog, and can include pictures, videos even, and can even be shared with other schools around the world if the teacher is class-twinning in some way with other international classes.

The notion of project work is something I've become much more enthused about as a teacher over the last 12 months or so, and is something that the Internet makes much more manageable. Whether you're just using something relatively simple to set up like a class blog on wordpress or blogspot or whether you're using something more sophisticated like voicethread, which allows you to place all kinds of texts, images, videos and documents online and to have conversations based around them, these kinds of sites allow students a real opportunity to practise wording their worlds, to develop their ideas and cultural ideas in the privacy of their own homes and in their own home, and to dig deeper into issues that we simply don't have time to explore more in class. At their best, they also allow for the beginnings of the kinds of cross-cultural interaction that would have been unimaginable in a pre-Internet age.

Finally, before I throw it over to you guys for your thoughts and your questions, I think we need to bear in mind the fact that first and foremost we are language teachers and our students are language learners, and that the primary way in which we aim to develop their ability to operate cross-culturally has to be through language. What this means is that if we want students to be able to do things such as be conscious of – and able to resist – stereotypes, say, then we need to think long and hard about what kind of language they'd need to achieve these ends, how this language might be got to them and what they can be asked to do with it.

On top of the adjectives being explicitly focused on, there is, of course, the undercutting of stereotypes going on here with the Oh come on! responses. There's also plenty of space for the culturally aware teacher to talk about the nature of stereotypes – and the harm they can cause – as well, whilst the really adventurous – and more language-focused - can use the speaking as a chance to teach things like There's a grain of truth in all stereotypes / They're seen as being quite cold and distant / They come across as quite polite / That's a gross over-generalization – and so on. There's also space for students to think about THEY might be seen by people from other countries and to discuss the degree to which this may or may not be true.

Finally, there's a follow-up on a structure very useful for dispelling assumptions and stereotypes. As well as simply reading it, you may like to just quickly try to make a few sentences using this generative little chunk yourselves. Here are mine:

Just because I'm English, it doesn't mean I'm stuck-up.