were driven largely by needs analysis, rather than cultural considerations.
The intercultural approach also recognises the fact that different learners
have different needs, and that these needs should be taken into consider-
ation when devising curricula and courses. Learners may have more or less
immediate contact with the target culture; and they may have, as individu-
als, more or less interest in the range of products produced by that culture
(some might be motivated by a focus on literature, art, music, television, or
films, while others might not). Some learners might wish to integrate
seamlessly into an L2 subculture (for example, an academic or professional
community) whereas others might wish to retain a distinct cultural identity
while also requiring to communicate with a range of L2 speakers. These
various needs and wants will impact upon the type of input that the
materials and course designer will wish to use, and also impact upon the
goals of the course, whether the learner is being trained to be mainly a
cultural observer or to be an active member of a specific subcultural group,
such as academics.
The following chapters of this book cater for a range of these needs. First
of all, the learner is seen as a cultural observer and analyst – as a kind of
‘ethnographer’. The explicit observation and analysis of the relationship
between language and cultural settings may be seen as a highly specialised
skill, but it is a skill which is extremely useful for L2 learners, for the reasons
given above. Primarily, it is a skill that will equip them for areas of possible
misunderstanding in the target culture, and, one hopes, by promoting
better understanding, this skill will promote tolerance and enjoyment of
the target culture. Secondly, most learners will wish to participate at some
level in the target culture – whether as casual conversationalists or as
members of specific subcultural communities. Other factors (such as race,
colour, class and ethnicity) notwithstanding, linguistic membership of
these subcultures entails competence in the genres which serve them. The
succeeding chapters on this book therefore give advice and suggestions on
(1) training learners to be cultural observers, and (2) demonstrating to
learners how different genres (spoken and written) are products of
subcultural communities with specific cultural needs.
There is a danger in packaging the cultural content of courses too neatly,
because culture is a dynamic concept, forever being negotiated and renego-
tiated by its members. No sooner has an ELT materials designer codified
the norms of behaviour of a particular community than these norms have
shifted. For this reason, training in cultural observation should be part of
most courses.
A thorny political question is how much learners should be expected to
conform to the norms and values of a target culture, if these are alien or
irrelevant to an individual’s concerns. Casanave (1992) gives a case study
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of ‘Virginia’, a Hispanic woman who joined a doctoral programme in
sociology at an American university, only to find that the theoretical
concerns and demands of that subculture (i.e. the culture of quantitative
sociologists) did not meet her needs as a woman who wished to tackle
practical social issues. She dropped out after a year. Casanave (1992: 165–6)
notes that the conflict between her ‘home’ culture and the target ‘academic’
culture was realised partly in her rejection of technical language in favour
of ‘everyday’ terms:
Language in some ways lay at the heart of her self-identity by helping
define who she was and with which reference group she would align
herself. By ‘using Dr. Bernstein’s language’ she was aligning herself
with scientists, not with the populations with whom she wished to
communicate at home and in future work: women, ethnic minorities,
educators in racially and culturally mixed neighbourhoods. She
rejected this alignment, but had no convenient linguistic substitute
because so many of the new concepts seemed to be created out of the
specialized language itself.
Casanave notes that the university’s academics were trying to do their best
for their students – rigorous application of theoretical modes of validation
is highly valued in academic circles and its mastery leads to status and
influence in that community. However, Virginia’s particular needs were
not met by the course she was offered. Casanave (1992: 179) concludes by
suggesting that in cases where prospective new members come from
diverse backgrounds, it is the subculture that has to rethink its norms and
values:
A program that admits half or more of its doctoral students from
outside the mainstream White middle-class culture needs to consider
seriously the question of how relevant its socialization practices are to a
culturally diverse group. If certain skills and values are deemed funda-
mental, how can they be transmitted more meaningfully to people who
may have no inherent interest in the intellectual inventions of White
males?
In short, there are profound consequences when an L2 speaker participates
in an L1 culture – not just for the learner but potentially for the members of
the target culture, who risk having their cherished values challenged by the
new or aspiring members. The language teacher supporting learners like
Virginia is faced with the options of training them either to assimilate
invisibly into the L2 culture, or to articulate their resistance to its values.
Equipping learners to resist the values of an education system is clearly a
high-risk option. More generally, the question of how many cherished
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