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Conclusion
This chapter has considered ways of integrating an intercultural per-
spective with language activities that practise one of the most popular and
yet elusive types of ‘general’ English, namely casual conversation. I have
argued that one of the issues that has made the teaching of conversation
difficult is that the communicative approach has tended to neglect the
interactional function of speech and focused instead on its transactional
function, namely, the exchange of information. The learner has been taught
to understand and give, for example, facts, commands, advice and sugges-
tions, but has not been taught how these are used to negotiate an individual
and group identity within the target and home cultures. What is required to
redress the balance is a shift in emphasis, rather than wholesale rejection of
earlier models and activities. The activities sketched out in this chapter are
not dissimilar to familiar communicative activities (indeed, some build on
already published materials); however, the focus here is on recent research
into the cultural functions of conversation, particularly by Eggins and
Slade (1997). Such research forms the basis of practical classroom activities
that in turn can provide a framework for further ethnographic analysis of
discourse drawn from both the target and home cultures.
The intercultural approach raises some thorny ethical questions. The
avoidance of a cultural perspective by some earlier communicative
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materials was not always an accident, but sometimes a principled stance.
Ethical issues are evident when we look at, for example, the descriptions of
roles that men and women take in mixed-gender conversations in
‘Western’ culture. Research in America, Britain and Australia suggests con-
sistently that men tend to initiate and challenge, while women monitor,
back-channel and respond – unless the group is composed of very good
friends, where roles can be more evenly distributed. This, some argue, is
indicative of women’s role in a culture that is still deeply patriarchal, where
men’s power and women’s subservience continues to be played out in the
patterns of everyday conversational interaction.
Accepting that such a description is indeed a valid representation of
actual conversational behaviour (which is arguable), how do we respond to
it as materials writers, syllabus designers and teachers? Should, for
example, Japanese or Argentinian teachers of English tell their female
students that they should avoid opening conversational exchanges in
mixed company unless with friends – but they should do a lot of
mmm-ing
and
wow-ing
to encourage male participants to develop their conversa-
tional topics? In other words, should teachers encourage learners to
submerge their first-culture identity in an assumed, and almost certainly
stereotypical, second-culture identity?
This question is too large to address adequately here (see FitzGerald,
2003 for an extensive discussion of intercultural talk), but a provisional, if
somewhat glib, response is that teachers and materials designers should
build into cultural activities genuine
opportunities for reflection
. Reflection
should allow a critique of both home and target cultures, and the explora-
tion of how learners position themselves in each. Active reflection should
develop intercultural awareness (cf. Byram & Fleming, 1998; Kramsch,
1993). Obviously, as educators, we must expect learners’ behaviour to
change – after all, that is the purpose of education – but that change should
be a result of choices that the learner controls, not a result of values imposed
by a teacher, syllabus or institutional authority. An intercultural perspective
is therefore a rich and powerful learning resource, which satisfies not just
language-learning goals but the goals of a wider humanistic curriculum.
Culture and Conversational English
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Chapter 4
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