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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