Second-language teacher education
Previously, it was believed that the best way to prepare language teachers to be at ease in this manner was to give them as much knowledge as possible about the target culture. This included, but was not limited to, its literature, etiquette, geography, history, and religions. In German education theory this body of knowledge was called realia, a word that then subsequently spread to other European countries (though not so much to the United Kingdom).6 Teachers would learn to read, write, speak, and listen, and these skills would be supplemented by realia; they would then transfer all this to the students in their classes. Institutionally, such a method of educating second-language teachers was supplemented by area-studies experts: thus, a professor who knew a lot about, say, Chinese literature, would give teacher learners an overview of their specialization.
High culture was generally used by nationalism from the late 18th century as the expression of a particular nation’s spirit. Canons, including those in language-teacher education programs, were rearranged according to the requirements of this ideology—for instance, omitting or demoting works that were not in the national language or were not complementary to the national story, and emphasizing works that aggrandized the nation. Thus, when one wished to learn, say, German, one was expected to be at least generally familiar with the landmarks of German culture. Literature was obviously valorized above the other arts, as it is made of language and thus helpfully connects with the task of language learning. Having learned how to read, write, speak, and listen in German, one then additionally possessed a knowledge of the German soul as expressed in its literary works, and this knowledge would help in meeting and talking with Germans, for they must have part of that soul in them (the idea went), since they were, well, Germans.
Kramsch elaborates on this situation in German departments in the US: there the language is considered either “a functional tool for communication” to facilitate economic activity or the carrier of high culture that “tends to emphasize literary analysis or the cultivation of an intellectual canon […] from Goethe to Grass and Hegel to Habermas—a tradition unsullied by economic interests associated with linguistic competence.”7 In Europe we find the same division, even if it does not lead to the kind of institutional hierarchy that Kramsch describes in the US, with graduate students teaching practical foreign-language classes and faculty members teaching culture (“the teaching of language at the bottom and the teaching of culture at the top”8). On one side there is not enough culture, and on the other there is too much, with little or no connection between the two.9
There never was much empirical basis to this approach, but at least if one had read the same works as Germans had in school, then one had a common theme of conversation. What resulted decades later was the predicament that many literary scholars throughout the world found themselves in. If you were an expert in English literature teaching at a university in Japan, then most likely your job was to lecture future English-language teachers. You were unlikely to know exactly how a knowledge of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens would help your students in their future careers, but to the best of your abilities you explained these writers’ wit, their social insights, and the relations of their work with the longer tradition. Perhaps you encouraged a critical approach; perhaps you tried to share your enthusiasm for these works.
While the many curricular hours spent on literature in second-language teacher education may have some general informative value, they also may be irrelevant to the demands of the profession. Culture, in this formulation, is viewed as something superfluous to the main job of grammar drills and vocabulary lists. In Spain, for instance, future English-language teachers must pass an examen de oposición in which they demonstrate a knowledge of the historical development of British and American literature even if they will be teaching learners basic English. Such an approach is employed widely throughout Europe and beyond, even though anecdotal evidence and reviews of curricula indicate that few teachers will ever directly employ such knowledge in their classrooms. Literary scholars who teach these courses often see no reason to question the value of their work, since it receives implicit approval from educational authorities by its inclusion in curricula. Yet the realities of the profession require, as Karen Risager believes, that “the language teacher of today has to take account the shifting landscapes of language and cultures and try to enact an alternative to the national paradigm, which is increasingly untenable in the modern complex world.”10
Intercultural theory, in contrast, proposes a different model from this widely established practice of literature and culture. Rather than encouraging student teachers (as well as language learners) to absorb a large body of information about the literary tradition of the foreign language (we’ll return to problems with this approach later), students must shift their perspective, moving from that of the home culture that they grew up in to that of the culture of their interlocutor. Integral to this is the ability to view their own culture, as it were, from the outside, as something bounded, not as a universal system of behavior and social and political conviction. In the previous dispensation, language teachers (and then their learners) were supposed to be taught how to imitate the native speakers of the target culture; an intercultural approach, in contrast, encourages students to occupy what Kramsch has called the “third space” between the two cultures: that is, neither a chameleonlike adoption of the target culture nor a stubborn adherence to the home culture, but rather a stance, an attitude that enables communication between the two.11
What might this look like in practice? We often encounter people who are expert users of a language but who do not pass as native speakers. They have developed a style of talking that does not fully erase their mother tongue, but does not raise barriers to understanding. (The same phenomenon can occur intralingually when, say, a person from a rural background attends university in a large city.) They are not natives, but, as evidenced by their sophisticated grasp of the target language and culture, they are not outsiders either. They might be said to occupy Kramsch’s third space.
A person like this will have acquired certain skills along the way, and these broadly resemble those already described that enable intercultural communication. Over the decades spent learning a second language, many ...
