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is
broadly conceived.
For those teachers who demand a more focused curriculum, Byram’s
savoirs
offer a careful, consistent and, above all, practical guide to the con-
struction of an intercultural curriculum. It is nevertheless true that some of
the academic disciplines that contribute to intercultural exploration – for
example, ethnography, visual literacy and cultural studies – are often
dauntingly theoretical and abstract. However, as I hope I have shown in
Chapters 5–8 in this book, once you have a grasp of their basic principles
and the history of their development, they become much more accessible,
and their application to teaching and learning becomes clearer. Moreover,
the classroom activities adopted in an intercultural approach do not very
often stray from those activities familiar from much ‘communicative’
teaching and learning: role-plays, simulations, project work, debates and
questionnaires, with attendant reading, listening and viewing tasks.
Chapters 3 and 4 show that a ‘cultural turn’ has already influenced much
that has been happening in the development of written and spoken skills in
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the mainstream ELT classroom. An intercultural approach does not
demand a wholesale revolution in teaching practices – it requires a redirec-
tion towards a significantly altered set of goals, goals that, for the majority
of learners, are more readily realised than slow progress towards a vaguely
conceived ‘native speaker proficiency’.
It is true that few commercial language schools can arrange for learners
to visit the target culture and engage in the direct forms of ethnography
discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. However, this does not invalidate an
intercultural approach. As demonstrated in Chapter 5, ‘home ethnogra-
phy’ is equally viable, and ‘distance’ or ‘virtual ethnography’ is sometimes
possible through ‘tandem’ projects involving email or ‘snailmail’ corre-
spondence (Dodd, 2001). These can be combined with an analysis of the
products of English speaking culture as available in the media, advertising,
literature and other cultural phenomena such as art, dance, fashion and
music (Chapters 7 and 8). At the heart of the intercultural curriculum are
practices of observation, analysis and explanation – and both the home and
anglophone culture provide manifest opportunities for the development of
these practices. For better or worse, wherever you are in the world, the
opportunities are usually there for observation and analysis of anglophone
cultures through television, film, video, radio, and the World Wide Web.
Viewers with access to cable television in Latin America, for example, have
ample opportunity to compare the conventions of home-grown ‘tele-
novelas’ with American (and occasionally British) soap operas. Websites
devoted to the programmes also allow a certain amount of ‘virtual ethnog-
raphy’ through audience research.
English-language teachers who might be anxious about the intercultural
curriculum, then, can in principle be reassured about the motivations
underlying it and the consequences of introducing it. On a more positive
note, an intercultural approach can validate current classroom practices
that otherwise might seem removed from the communicative goal of
native-speaker proficiency – e.g. exploration of the home culture, or
analysis of the conventions of advertising or television programmes. The
motivation of teachers and learners can be enhanced by the realisation that
the language class is part of a larger exploration of everyday cultural
practices, at home and abroad.
An intercultural approach embraces and transforms all three types of
educational curriculum that White (1988: 24) identifies. It might best be
described as ‘neo-humanist’, since it places respect for individuals and
their many cultures at the heart of its enterprise. The intercultural learner
moves among cultures, in a process of continual negotiation, learning to
cope with the inevitable changes, in a manner that is ultimately empower-
ing and enriching. The home culture is never denied nor demeaned, yet the
Prospects for Teaching and Learning Language and Culture
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intercultural learner will find his or her attitudes and beliefs challenged by
contact with others, and the process of interaction will lead to the kind of
personal growth characterised by ‘progressive’ curricula. The social (or
‘reconstructionist’) outcome will be a generation of learners who are
trained (to different degrees) in ‘intercultural diplomacy’ – who will conse-
quently have learnt to cope with the stresses of living in the multicultural
global village that the world has become.
Taken to extremes, the vision may well seem utopian, and, as noted
earlier, it would be facile to suggest that intercultural language education
alone can make people kinder, more tolerant and open. However, if
adopted more widely, it may offer a modest contribution to that process.
Much has still to be done, for example to incorporate intercultural strate-
gies into the kinds of textbooks used commonly in commercial language
schools. Ideally, ‘intercultural’ textbooks would be targeted more specifi-
cally at particular communities, and result from partnerships between
native-speaker and non-native speaker contributors. They would offer
support for project work and ethnography as well as specific lessons giving
language support. Commercial language examinations (such as those run
by UCLES, Oxford and others) also need to take account of advances in the
assessment of intercultural skills reviewed briefly in Chapter 9, and offer
appropriate tests, if intercultural education is to advance in the commercial
sector in the next few decades.
However, as I hope this book has shown, much has also been achieved in
the past few decades. At the very least, intercultural language education
has reached a level of maturity sufficient to inform a coherent set of
classroom practices whereby language improvement is allied to more
general ways of understanding our world.
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