provides a suitable ‘fit’ for the contractual relationship the institution has
with its clients: the unspoken agreement is that the learner (or the learner’s
sponsors) will pay for a form of teaching that will facilitate his or her lin-
guistic development. To caricature the relationship broadly, commercial
schools provide a service; they do not aim to ‘brainwash’ clients into liberal
thinking or to challenge the ideological basis of their existence.
There may, therefore, be understandable suspicion of intercultural
approaches particularly among some educators in the commercial sector.
This suspicion may result from some of the following reasonable anxieties:
•
it is not the job of the commercial English language school to inculcate
moral values;
•
intercultural education might have unsavoury associations with a
crude classical humanist model that esteemed western cultural
values at the expense of non-western values (cf. Phillipson, 1992);
•
intercultural education might also have associations with ‘encultur-
ation’ or the desire to impose a possibly unwanted cultural identity
on
the learner;
•
‘culture’ is a notoriously vague
concept at the best of times;
•
ways of approaching culture academically – through ethnography
and cultural studies – are unnecessarily bewildering and they seem to
have
little practical application;
•
if intercultural language education does have a place, it is in the state
sector, which has the time to explore moral issues and, in some cases,
the resources to allow educational visits to the target culture, where
learners can engage in ‘face to face’ ethnography if they so desire.
Intercultural language education is a curriculum option, competing with
other types of curriculum; however, most of the anxieties raised above can
be allayed. While it is the goal of the intercultural curriculum to foster
certain values, those values are expressly designed to respect rather than
threaten learners’ own systems of belief. The key values promoted by the
intercultural curriculum are open-mindedness, curiosity, tolerance of dif-
ference, and respect – for self and others. As noted above, properly
implemented, the intercultural curriculum should empower learners, and
promote their self-confidence. The intercultural curriculum should be dis-
tinguished from other curricula that in the past have promoted ‘culture’ –
for example, the classical humanist curriculum that presented ‘great
works’ of the English literary canon for translation and appreciation. As
Chapter 8 showed, literary, media and cultural texts form an integral part
of the intercultural curriculum (as they do with many ‘communicative’
approaches to ELT), but they serve as occasions for cultural exploration
Prospects for Teaching and Learning Language and Culture
209
C:\Documents and Settings\Stephen Cracknell\My Documents\corbett\corbett.vp
13 August 2003 16:39:17
Color profile: Generic CMYK printer profile
Composite Default screen
and intercultural comparison, not as reservoirs of eternal ‘civilised values’.
Nor does the intercultural curriculum aim to construct ‘model Americans’
or ‘model Europeans’, although, as noted, some of Byram’s work has been
conducted within the umbrella of the Council of Europe, which links
language education with an evolving notion of ‘European citizenship’
encompassing both eastern and western Europe (Byram, 1997b: 25–6).
‘Model citizens’ in an intercultural curriculum would not be individuals
with specific beliefs on particular topics, but rather individuals who could
reflect upon the attitudes and behaviour of self and others, and engage in
an ongoing negotiation between them. Not all intercultural negotiations
will be susceptible to resolution: after all, different groups in a single
society hold strongly divergent views on topics such as capital punish-
ment, the right to life, the traditional roles of men and women in society,
and how children should be educated. The intercultural learner learns how
to explore the beliefs of others without recourse to crass stereotyping, to
respect these beliefs in their context (without necessarily subscribing to
them), and to respond to them in such a way that the others will be inclined
to understand and respect the learner’s own position.
Few language teachers will argue with an approach to teaching and
learning that promotes mutual respect. However, the remaining anxieties
are significant ones: that culture is a vague concept and that ethnography
and cultural studies are complex disciplines that add unnecessary burdens
to the teacher’s already considerable workload. For some teachers, of
course, the vagueness of the concept of culture is liberating. The variety of
classroom practices developed in the name of ‘cultural learning’ bears
witness to the fact that many teachers and learners find intercultural explo-
ration stimulating and creative precisely because it
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
