Reflection: Teaching Culture

I found this week's topic to be one of the most interested we've covered in class.  Culture is one of those things that comes up a lot in ELT literature, but often it feels glossed over, like we're assumed to have a good grasp on such a pervasive (yet slippery) concept.  The Guth & Helm (2012) chapter was particularly elucidating for a couple reasons.  For one, it described a framework for describing culture: Perspectives, Practices, and Products.  It noted that Products were the most commonly treated in ESL/EFL materials, and based on my own language learning experiences, Products are commonly treated in other foreign language materials as well.  The chapter also discussed online cultures, and as someone who grew up during the early heyday of AOL and has interacted in various online communities since, I thought it was nice to see the intricacies and defining points of those cultures treated in ELT literature.

Another interesting point brought up this week was the notion of essentialist versus non-essentialist views of culture.  Like Products in the PPP model, essentialist views of culture are most often presented in EFL/ESL materials.  "All Americans eat/do/think this" sort of stuff.  My foreign language learning experiences have definitely tended to present the target culture along essentialist lines, and frankly, it got to be tiring.  In my experience learning Korean, for example, I don't know how many times I read about the same holidays, bowing, using 100% formal speech to talk to older people, drinking rituals, what time of year mothers get together to make kimchi, and how King Sejong invented the Korean alphabet, hangeul.  Most of these were things I read on Wikipedia before stepping foot in the country!  I felt like it was the equivalent of just hammering ESL/EFL students with stuff about George Washington.  While discussing the issue with Turkan, I asked if her English learning experience was ever like that, and lo and behold, it was! :(  I feel so sorry for learners who have to hear about American myths like George chopping down a cherry tree.  How useless!

I think there's a lot of potential for teaching non-essentialist culture, and doing so in a way that advances students' language ability.  Pragmatics, to me, is a natural crossroads for language and culture, and while on the surface it could sometimes appear essentialist (e.g., Americans say please a lot), but the key to pragmatics is using different approaches in different situations, often based on a lot of intertwining factors.  By comparing pragmatics between L1 and L2, students can also develop their intercultural competence.  Intercultural competence is a topic explored in the Guth & Helm chapter as well as the Liaw (2006) article that Kerry presented, and I came across another article, by Ishihara (2009) recently dealing with instructional treatment and teacher-assessment of pragmatics that also incorporated intercultural comparisons.  Students made some pretty deep realizations about the differences between English and Japanese pragmatics as well as increased their general understanding/competence in English pragmatics.  It's worth a read if you've got the time; here's the reference:

Ishihara, N. (2009).  Teacher-based assessment for foreign language pragmatics.  TESOL Quarterly, 43(3), 445-470.