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Acknowledgements
The process of turning this volume into a finished product has been a long
one. I am grateful to all the inspirational colleagues and students from my
time living and teaching in Italy, Britain, Russia and Brazil, and to those I
met elsewhere at seminars usually organised by Nick Wadham-Smith of
the British Council. A smaller number of scholars, colleagues and friends
substantially influenced the final outcome: you will recognise yourselves
in the pages that follow, and I am indebted to you all. I am also grateful to
the Department of English Language at the University of Glasgow for
sparing me for an academic session, so that I could write the first full draft
of the manuscript. Christian Kay, Alan Pulverness and Mike Byram gener-
ously read versions of the work in progress and made constructive
comments. Alison Phipps spurred me to get the job done. Throughout,
Augusta Alves has been a constant source of ideas, support and love – to
her this work is dedicated. The errors that remain are, obviously, my own
responsibility.
The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (www.scran.ac.uk)
kindly gave permission under its licence to reproduce the following
copyright images: a statue of the Buddha and a print of a Highland soldier
accompanied by a slave (National Museums of Scotland).
The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse
and Duane Hanson’s
Tourists
are reproduced
with the kind permission of the National Gallery of Scotland and the
Design and Artists Copyright Society.
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Foreword
Dr Martin Montgomery
An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching
draws upon a range
of intellectual traditions to explore the cultural contexts of language and of
language learning. Although some learners acquire another language for
quite specific and limited purposes, increasingly we adapt our language
and learn new ones under the pressures of migration and out of the need to
reach a settlement with new contexts of communication. These new
contexts are not simply contexts for language use but structured instances
of a culture at work in all its richness and density. How language works,
how we make sense in language, how we mean things to each other – all
take place within specific contexts. And in these contexts, cultures are in
play as habitual patterns of interaction, routine forms of social practice,
recurrent uses of symbol, sedimented frameworks of value and belief. As a
dense backdrop, culture is implicated in every instance of language in use.
But if culture is a constant backdrop to the everyday use of language,
how is it best to equip the learner with cultural knowledge? For while any
language as a code is finite, cultures are boundless and it is difficult to antic-
ipate what features of context will be significant for communication. The
approach adopted by this book is to equip the learner with ways of
analysing and interpreting culture. Fundamentally it provides the learner
with methodologies for exploring cultural difference enabling them to
explore their own culture as well as the target culture. For if we are to
bridge the gap between our cultural origins and our destinations we need
ways of observing, interpreting, and understanding the cultures we
encounter and the differences between them and our own.
Raymond Williams – a representative of one tradition discussed in the
pages that follow – once commented that ‘culture is ordinary’, emphasising
its immediate and all-pervasive presence. Culture is at play in forms of
politeness, in culinary practice, in popular song, in fashion and in the many
ways we symbolise our distance from or our solidarity with others. But if
culture is ordinary, it is also – like language itself – in flux. Increasingly
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global patterns of communication threaten to erode cultural differences in
the long term; at the same time, however, those very cultural differences
become more palpable, come to symbolise the resistance of the local to the
global and take on new vitality as a result. Williams also described culture
as ‘the whole way of life of a people’. In settled societies this whole way of
life could be invisible: it was all that people knew. But, as change acceler-
ates, as societies fragment and cultures divide, culture itself and degrees of
cultural difference become more visible.
A central thesis of this important book is that we need to re-consider a
long-established goal of language teaching. An understandable aspiration
of language teachers was to inculcate a native-speaker like linguistic com-
petence in the target language. This book offers a different picture of
learning language as an open-ended and continuing process in which we
move from one set of linguistic and cultural contexts into others, each of
which demands new efforts of translation and interpretation. The language
learner moving between cultures is an intercultural learner and hence, as
this book argues and exemplifies in rich detail, needs an intercultural
approach to language teaching. The approach offered in these pages
promises to enrich the learning of a language; in addition, however, it
promises to alert learners to the operation of cultural difference by
providing techniques for comparing one culture with another, ultimately
enabling the learner better to negotiate the distance between their own and
another culture. In this way the learner becomes not just a competent
speaker and hearer of another linguistic code but a mediator between
cultures – a cultural diplomat.
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Intercultural Approaches to ELT
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Chapter 1
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