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‘Cultural’ Texts and English Language Teaching
The history of using cultural texts in ELT parallels the history of using
such texts in native-speaker education. Earlier last century, the ‘canon’ of
great texts was presented to students in order to transmit the values of
‘civilised’ anglophone culture. In the context of the anglophone countries,
this process can now be seen as the imposition of white, middle-class male
values via a literary canon; in an overseas (and especially a post-colonial)
context, the process can further be viewed as an imperialistic project,
however well-intentioned its proponents might be (cf. Phillipson, 1992). As
the tide of empire ebbed, different approaches to the teaching of literature
Using Literary, Media and Cultural Studies
171
‘meaningful’ text
encoding
decoding
Participant x:
Participant y:
Frameworks of knowledge
Frameworks of knowledge
Relations of production
Relations of production
Technical infrastructure
Technical infrastructure
decoding
encoding
‘
meaningful’ text
Figure 8.1
Model of discourse production and processing (adapted from
Hall, 1980)
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followed. For example, Widdowson (1975) promotes stylistics, effectively a
linguistically informed ‘close reading’ of texts, partly to improve learners’
understanding and appreciation of the creative potential of the target
language system. Later, articles in Brumfit and Carter (1986) challenge the
ethnocentric bias of ‘the great tradition’ and argue for the recognition in
ELT of literatures in World Englishes. More recently, literature books such
as Lazar (1993) and McRae (1991) stress ‘literature with a small l’. In these
books, non-canonical literature is seen as a means of understanding the
mind-set of a range of English speakers, as a way of accessing their frames
of knowledge, values and presuppositions.
Media and cultural studies have a comparatively shorter history in ELT.
Language activities have been designed to take advantage of the wide-
spread use of video in ELT (e.g. Cooper
et al
., 1991), but comparatively little
has been published for teachers on the application of media studies as such.
Some impact, however is being made by coursebooks such as Edginton and
Montgomery’s advanced-level
The Media
(1996), a systematic approach to
the study of advertising and news reports in the press and television. At a
lower level, the
True to Life
series of textbooks (Gairns
et al
., 1996) includes
activities that suggest the influence of media studies – the Intermediate
coursebook, for example, has activities based on the cross-cultural compar-
ison of game shows (units 3 and 4)
As we have seen above, literary and media studies are closely linked to
cultural studies, and the few teachers’ guides and student coursebooks
specifically to focus on cultural studies tend to include literary and media
topics too. Bassnett (1997) has a high literary content, although one of the
articles included, Durant (1997), is particularly concerned with the process
of selection of a broader range of texts for cultural exploration.
Crossing
Cultures,
(Chichirdan
et al.
, 1998), a coursebook produced for 12th grade
Romanian school pupils, ranges widely across general cultural topics (e.g.
Welsh national icons and images of the British monarchy) as well as literary
topics (‘gendering the canon’) and media themes (‘the rhetoric of ads’, and
the role of soaps).
To summarise, then, mediated texts, that is, those texts communicated
by some form of mass media, have long been used successfully in ELT, and
recent years have seen an upsurge in their use as a cultural resource. What
useful generalisations can be made about their use in the ‘intercultural’
ELT classroom? First, we should not confuse the world-view represented
in a book, television programme or spectator event with an ‘unmediated’
communicative event. The presence of an audience (usually a paying
audience, directly or indirectly) changes the nature of the discourse. Given
that fact, we can then focus on different aspects of the ‘discourse cycle’
adapted from Hall (Figure 8.1), remembering as we do so that too narrow a
172
Intercultural Approaches to ELT
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focus on one part of the total discourse process can distort our view of the
whole. The model of discourse offers a set of ways of approaching texts;
however, it gives no guidance in the selection of appropriate materials. The
sections which follow consider in turn literary, media and cultural texts,
and suggest ways of exploiting them which are related to their disciplinary
traditions, and which also focus on different stages of the ‘encoding-
decoding’ cycle shown in Figure 8.1.
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