demands, as Stern (1992) argues, a focus on people rather than on language
as such. To understand how a community uses language it is deemed
necessary to understand the community: the dynamic system of its beliefs,
values and dreams, and how it negotiates and articulates them. While
earlier language learning textbooks might invite an uncritical celebration
of the target culture, current intercultural curricula suggest a more
cautious description and critical evaluation. The home culture as well as
the target culture may well come under scrutiny in such programmes.
Stern (1992: 207) also identifies some fundamental problems in implement-
ing a cultural syllabus:
In our view the following four issues have to be dealt with: (a) the
vastness of the culture concept; (b) the problem of goal determination
and the lack of accessible information; (c) questions of syllabus design
and the difficulty of according an appropriate place to culture in a pre-
dominantly language-oriented approach; (d) questions of teaching
procedures and the difficulty of handling substantive subject-matter in
a mainly skill-oriented programme.
According to Stern, the first two of these issues hindered the proliferation of
cultural syllabuses, certainly up until the early 1990s. If culture is indeed ‘the
whole way of life’, or ‘the dynamic belief-system of a community’, then it is
certainly difficult to know how these vast concepts can be approached, partic-
ularly in language classrooms where communication is already constrained.
However, from the various, interacting traditions of linguistics and anthropol-
ogy, as well as literary, media and cultural studies, we can adapt techniques of
observation and description, as well as the analysis and evaluation of texts and
social practices, in order to equip learners with ways of making sense of target
cultures. A redefinition of the goals of the communicative curriculum, and a
skills-based orientation towards intercultural exploration, go some way
towards addressing Stern’s remaining anxieties. We do not have to pre-
package the vast and changing target culture for learners if developing appro-
priate tools for intercultural exploration becomes one of the central goals of
language education.
It should also be clear from the above that the concept of ‘culture’ is not
necessarily related – or even best related – to nationalities. British culture is
not just made up of English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh cultures,
but of communities characterised by a range of factors, including age,
gender, class, ethnicity and even such things as leisure pursuits. We can
talk about ‘Welsh culture’ but we can also talk about ‘youth culture’, and
the cultures of football fans, soap opera viewers and different academic dis-
ciplines. Most recent writing on ‘culture’ and ELT has assumed a more-or-
less anthropological view of culture as an entire way of life. The concept
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was in fact clearly defined in one of the early discussions of the communica-
tive approach:
[Culture] involves the implicit norms and conventions of a society, its
methods of ‘going about doing things’, its historically transmitted but
also adaptive and creative ethos, its symbols and its organisation of
experience. (Loveday, 1981: 34)
Loveday’s definition of culture incorporates a number of key concerns that
will be evident in later chapters of this book. A society (or any cohesive group
of individuals) constructs for itself a set of beliefs and presuppositions that it
will come to regard as ‘common sense’. These beliefs relate to the behaviour of
the group, and also to the kinds of things it produces to celebrate or assert its
identity and values. The language of the group – its ‘symbols’ – in turn serve to
organise its experience, and to construct and maintain group identity and
cohesion. However, we must always be aware that the norms, beliefs,
practices and language of any group are not static but dynamic – the group is
forever negotiating and renegotiating its norms and values among its mem-
bership. Therefore, the core beliefs – and the language that articulates them –
will necessarily change over time. The ‘culture’ of a group can be considered
the
relationship
between its core beliefs and values, and the patterns of
behaviour, art and communication that the group produces, bearing in
mind that these beliefs and values are constantly being negotiated within
the group.
Foreign language learners are in the position of someone who is outside
the target language group, looking in. Learners may not wish to adopt the
practices or beliefs of the target culture, but they should be in a position to
understand these practices and beliefs if they wish fully to comprehend the
language that members of the target culture produce. It is this recognition
that language is more than the transfer of information – it is the assertion,
negotiation, construction and maintenance of individual and group identi-
ties – that has led to the development of an intercultural approach to
language education.
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