An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching

John Corbett, Prof. John Corbett

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781788928601
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788928632
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is a thoroughly revised, updated and expanded edition of a practical introduction to intercultural education for teachers of English as a second language. It provides a concise summary of the intellectual and pedagogical traditions that have shaped intercultural language education, from ethnography to critical pedagogy and cultural studies. The book offers clear illustrations of the practical impact of these traditions on curriculum design, classroom activities and assessment. As well as addressing developments in the field since the publication of the 1st edition, this new edition also reflects on the impact of online resources for English language education. The book continues to make a powerful case for developing intercultural as well as linguistic competences and will remain invaluable reading for English language teachers across the world.

1 Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture

This book describes an approach to English language teaching (ELT) that puts at its centre the idea that speakers from diverse backgrounds negotiate different cultures as well as different languages. Moreover, the book argues that the exploration of familiar and unfamiliar cultures can be a driving force of English language education. While this is hardly a new approach to language education, it has never been uncontroversial. Part of the continuing controversy about this approach to language education is the fact that ‘culture’ itself is a much disputed and endlessly debated concept. The opening chapters therefore consider the ways in which culture has been understood by scholars in a number of academic disciplines from which English language educators have drawn inspiration. These disciplines include linguistics, communication studies, anthropology and literary, media and cultural studies – as well as some sub-disciplines within them, such as linguistic anthropology, ethnography and sociolinguistics. The purpose of the first two chapters in this book is to offer a brief summary of each of these disciplines. By doing so, I aim to alert the reader to some long-standing questions around ‘culture’ that language teachers who are interested in this approach need to address, and to suggest how the answers to these questions might shape practices in language education. The topics covered in the first chapter are:

• The limitations of early ‘communicative’ models of language teaching.
• The conceptualisation of culture in a range of linguistic theories that have influenced ELT.
• The impact of anthropology and ethnography on language education.

Some of the theoretical issues raised in the description of these ‘tributary’ disciplines and their subdisciplines might at a glance seem to be only of tangential interest to the language teacher, and so at the end of each section there are some open-ended questions for reflection that are designed to prompt readers to consider how the foregoing discussion is relevant to their own educational practices, and how their own (perhaps unconscious) assumptions about culture and language teaching have been shaped by arguments within these disciplines.

It is worth pausing here for a moment to consider a little further the reflective questions and their intent. The questions are formulated on the assumption that the reader will have some prior experience as either a language learner or a language teacher – or, in some chapters, as someone who has lived in one or more cultural context and is open to observing the phenomena and patterns of behaviour that characterise that context with fresh and critical eyes. Readers are thus invited to relate the content of this volume to their own experience and to test the claims in this volume against that experience. The ability to think reflectively and then shape one’s attitudes and behaviour accordingly, lies behind a number of educational approaches, including experiential learning, problem-based learning and action learning (e.g. Schön, 1983; Sofo et al., 2010). The reflective questions are offered here, partly as a way of summarising and pinpointing (and, indeed, raising questions about) some of the key issues in this book as it develops. Some of the questions require only a few moments’ consideration, others presuppose, or imagine, an extended discussion amongst peers – either colleagues or fellow trainee teachers. Yet others are intended to prompt rather more elaborate thought experiments. Their shared aim is that readers rethink their own experience and beliefs in the light of the volume, perhaps recognising and affirming certain articles of faith that are embedded, consciously or unconsciously, in their educational philosophy, but perhaps challenging others.

At the conclusion of Chapter 2, I offer a tentative working definition of culture that informs the approach that will then be described in the remainder of the book. The subsequent chapters aim to offer a sustained and coherent set of ways in which the exploration of cultures can inform aspects of ELT.

What is an ‘Intercultural’ Approach to English Language Teaching?

Since at least the mid-to-late 1980s, many teachers and educationalists have been arguing for an ‘intercultural’ approach to language teaching. The pioneering advocates of an intercultural approach invited teachers to re-examine their most basic assumptions about what language is used for, and what a course in a second or foreign language should seek to achieve. From the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, and probably, for many, up until the present day, at the heart of ‘communicative’ language pedagogy was the concept of the ‘information gap’. To simplify a complex shift in pedagogical beliefs and practices, language educators began to turn away from the idea that a second language was acquired mainly by the manipulation of linguistic structures, in activities such as drills. Instead, educationalists argued that by setting up activities that required learners to bridge a series of information gaps, those learners would ‘naturally’ develop their knowledge and skills in the second language (e.g. Richards, J., 2006: 18). Ideally, by engaging with those activities, good learners would acquire a proficiency that would make them indistinguishable from ‘native’ speakers.

This new view of language learning, as essentially a cognitive set of processes triggered by exposure to and engagement with the target language through a series of tasks, tended to underrate the role and value of culture. Towards the end of the 20th century, Stern (1992: 206) noted that, despite a sustained and consistent body of work, particularly in North America, that continued to draw attention to the importance of culture in language teaching, ‘the cultural component has remained difficult to accommodate in practice’. In fact, overtly ‘cultural’ content was often stripped from learning materials. Reviewing ELT in the 1970s and 1980s, Pulverness (1996) comments:

English was seen as a means of communication which should not be bound to culturally-specific conditions of use, but should be easily transferable to any cultural setting. Authenticity was a key quality, but only insofar as it provided reliable models of language in use. Content was important as a source of motivation, but it was seen as equally important to avoid material which might be regarded as ‘culture bound’. Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, syllabus design and materials writing were driven by needs analysis, and culture was subordinated to performance objectives. (Pulverness, 1996: 7)

As Pulverness observes, the anxiety about culture in language teaching, in the 1970s and 1980s, stemmed from different sources. An ostensibly ‘culture-free’ set of materials was easier for publishers to market internationally since it avoided the risk of appearing to promote or even impose anglocentric attitudes and values. Where ‘culture’ was evident (in references to, say, popular music, films or tourist sites), the rationale was to stimulate learners’ interest or recognition, but there was little sense that ‘learning culture’ was a central curricular objective. Reading or listening to texts about cultural phenomena, or writing and speaking about cultural topics, would simply be a way of activating or assessing language skills. One of the limitations of this attitude to culture was that ‘communicative’ language courses tended not to connect systematically with everyday reality, either the realities of learners’ own lives or the realities of the lives of those who spoke the target language. ‘Authentic’ cultural materials were exploited, as Pulverness says, as models and exemplars of language use but they were not necessarily used as educational content in their own right.

From the mid-1980s on, the view of ‘culture’ as a set of topics changed radically. Intercultural language educators began to argue that culture was embodied not only in a set of products, from, say, pop music to the plays of Shakespeare, but also in the experience of everyday life. It followed from this argument that the effective acquisition of a second language necessitated an understanding of the function of that language within the everyday experiences and feelings of its speakers. It further follows that if learners are truly to understand the function of a second language in the life of its speakers, they must be able to compare it with the function of their own language in their everyday life. To learn a second language is, therefore, to explore two languages, two worlds and the interaction between them. The exploration of the home language and English has become more relevant, and indeed urgent, as English has emerged as the global lingua franca of a digitally connected world. As English has developed as a lingua franca, the role of English language learners has also shifted from being aspiring ‘native’ speakers to being agents who might use all the linguistic resources at their disposal to mediate effectively between different languages and worlds (cf. May, 2014). Certainly, from the late 1980s, a series of educators (e.g. Byram, 1997b; Byram & Zarate, 1997; Corbett, 2003, 2010; Damen, 1987; Fantini, 1997; Guilherme, 2002; Kramsch, 1993) explored the implications of an intercultural approach to language teaching and learning.

Many of the precepts of an intercultural approach were eventually enshrined in European and North American policy documents that have had a global impact, namely the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) guidelines (Council of Europe, 2001; updated in North et al., 2018), and the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages and the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages’ Can-Do Statements for Intercultural Communication (NCSSFL-ACTFL, 2017). Because they are sophisticated statements that attempt to capture interculturality in ways that are relevant to language educators, these documents and their implications are discussed in some detail in Chapter 3, and their influence is evident throughout the present volume. They have, nevertheless, been subject to intense critical scrutiny and their limitations as expressions of interculturality will also be addressed.

While such policy statements and their global reception might indicate that there has been a shift in the past two decades towards the mainstream adoption of an intercultural approach in language pedagogy, the reality, as ever, is much more complicated. Introducing a set of case studies on the use of the CEFR within and beyond Europe in the first decade after its publication, Byram and Parmenter (2012: 5) acknowledge that many teachers have had difficulty in assimilating the 375 pages of the 2001 CEFR guidelines and focus only on the proficiency scales, A1–C2. The difficulty in applying the CEFR guidelines in all their nuanced complexity has not been assuaged by the publication of a 230-page Companion document (North et al., 2018). Perhaps as a response to the complexity of the CEFR, more succinct models have been proposed for intercultural learning; for example, The Global People Competency Framework (Spencer-Oatey & Stadler, 2009) aims to indicate to teachers and learners the kinds of knowledge, skills and personal qualities conducive to ‘effective intercultural interaction’. Moreover, despite the numerous introductions to aspects of intercultural communication and language teaching that have been published since the first edition of this book in 2003 (e.g. Byram, 2008; Dasli & Díaz, 2016; Holliday, 2018; Jackson, 2019), and despite the availability of multi-author, state-of-the-art surveys of the field (e.g. Jackson, 2014, 2020a), there remains a place for a volume that attempts to set out for teachers, clearly and concisely, the background and principles of an intercultural approach to ELT, and to indicate some accessible ways of implementing these principles in practice. That is the purpose of this revised and updated edition.

It will be evident from the above that much of the work on intercultural approaches to second language education has been carried out in state schools and colleges, and that documents such as the CEFR and the NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements are meant to guide state and public school practices. An intercultural approach perhaps remains less obviously relevant to ELT in the commercial sector. ‘Modern’ or ‘world’ language educators in state schools are normally required to formulate learning outcomes that explicitly embed the acquisition of languages in a broader humanistic curriculum that promotes cross-cultural understanding. Such goals are more likely to be part of a liberal, democratic, state-sponsored educational curriculum than a commercially driven one, or a curriculum in an authoritarian state. Even so, there are benefits for the commercial sector, and even in less politically liberal educational contexts, in adopting and adapting aspects of an intercultural approach. One obvious and thriving area is in language training for business or trade negotiations. The skills of observation, exploration, analysis and mediation that are addressed in the intercultural classroom give a coherent rationale for the teaching of the traditional ‘four skills’ of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Communicative, task-based language teaching has always demanded that classroom activities should have a purpose. An intercultural approach gives teachers and learners a clearly defined and consistent set of purposes: to develop the knowledge, attitudes and skills (linguistic and personal) that will enable individuals to explore and analyse new cultures and mediate between different cultural perspectives.

While a fully developed intercultural approach to English teaching is still rare in most commercial language schools, and indeed in many state schools (cf. Wagner et al., 2019), most English language teachers will nevertheless recognise in the contents of this book many activities that they already do. Notwithstanding any lingering anxieties about the use of explicitly ‘cultural’ content, most English teachers have always taken a personal interest in cultural activities and products, and their individual experience of and interest in some of the ‘tributary disciplines’ that feed into intercultural language education, such as literary and media studies or anthropology, will no doubt have led them to adopt a number of the practices suggested in this volume. Indeed, once alerted to it, most language teachers will recognise the possibilities afforded by an intercultural approach as an extensi...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the Second Edition and Acknowledgements
• Image Credits
• 1 Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture
• 2 From Intercultural Communication to Literary, Media and Cultural Studies
• 3 Defining Intercultural Communicative Competence
• 4 Implementing an Intercultural Approach to ELT
• 5 Culture and Conversation
• 6 Developing an Ethnographic Frame of Mind
• 7 Interviewing Skills for the Intercultural Learner
• 8 Virtual Ethnographies: Intercultural Telecollaboration
• 9 Developing Visual Literacy
• 10 Using Literary, Media and Cultural Studies
• 11 Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence
• 12 Further Prospects for Intercultural Language Education
• Appendix: Checklist of questions to promote visual literacy (see Chapter 9)
• References
• Index