Languages for intercultural communication and education

Moving culture from the margins to the centre
The foregoing discussion attempts to tease out approaches to the
teaching of culture that at times are closely interwoven. The everyday
practice of language teachers has long borrowed eclectically from different
educational approaches, and so the goals of systematic acculturation, or
enculturation, or indeed sociopolitical education are unlikely to have been
sustained consistently within curricula whose primary drive remains
towards language proficiency. The intercultural approach assimilates
some of the features of earlier approaches to culture in the communicative
curriculum. For example, an intercultural approach assumes that:
•
cultural topics (e.g. exploring how personal and group identities and
values are constructed) are interesting and motivating;
•
acculturation (the ability to function in another culture while main-
taining one’s own identity) is important;
•
‘cultural awareness-raising is an aspect of values education’ (Maley’s
introduction to Tomalin and Stempleski, 1993: 3);
•
intercultural language education should cast a critically reflective eye
on its own workings.
However, the intercultural approach differs from earlier approaches to
teaching culture by moving intercultural knowledge and skills centre-
stage, and making them an integral part of the curriculum. This means
adopting strategies from ethnography as well as linguistics, and defining,
teaching and testing intercultural knowledge and skills, as well as
language skills. Most radically, it means redefining the aims of language
education to acknowledge ‘intercultural communicative competence’
rather than ‘native-speaker proficiency’ as the ultimate goal. Not all
language teaching professionals or institutions will want to embrace
intercultural curricula in their entirety. Nevertheless, the following chapters,
which give a detailed discussion of the intercultural approach, should be of
interest to all those who enjoy reflecting on the means and methods of
second language education.
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Intercultural Approaches to ELT
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Chapter 2