Intercultural Approach to Language

Teaching
• Developed around mid 1980s (e.g. Stern, Byram, Corbett)
• Against the fact that In fact, cultural content has often be stripped from learning
materials
• Understanding cultural contexts of language and of language learning
• Cultures are in play as habitual patterns of interaction, routine forms of social practice,
recurrent uses of symbol, sedimented frameworks of value and belief
• Culture is implicated in every instance of language in use learning language as an open-
ended and continuing process in which we move from one set of linguistic and cultural
contexts into others, each of which demands new efforts of translation and
interpretation
• It promises to alert learners to the operation of cultural difference by providing
techniques for comparing one culture with another, ultimately enabling the learner
better to negotiate the distance between their own and another culture
Contd…
• The learner becomes not just a competent speaker and hearer of another linguistic code
but a mediator between cultures
• Integrating culture into communicative curriculum
• Addition of cultural skills to other skills of language
• The aim is not necessarily the ‘native speaker competence’ but rather an ‘intercultural
communicative competence’ (e.g. Byram, 1997; Guilherme, 2002)
• Intercultural communicative competence includes the ability to understand the language
and behaviour of the target community, and explain it to members of the ‘home’
community – and vice versa
• Multi-dicsiplinary approach
Addition to learner centered and task-based language curriculum
• Against the ‘one size fits all’/’one man army approach’
• Suspicion over ‘English through English’ policies
Contd…
• Paying attention to and respect the home culture and the home language
• Promoting to interdisciplinary (e.g. sociology, anthropology, ethnography,
linguistics, etc.) and cultural studies
• Against the approaches developing ‘culture-free communicative competence’
• Using ‘culture’ to motivate communication
• Language learning as acculturation
• Language learning as ‘enculturation’ (gradual learning of culture)
• Starting with Big ‘C’ (most visible culture) to small ‘c’ (invisible culture) (Tomalin
and Stempleski, 1993)
• Excluding the ‘elite culture’
• Moving culture from the margins to the centre
Assumptions…
• cultural topics (e.g. exploring how personal and group identities and
values are constructed) are interesting and motivating;
• acculturation (the ability to function in another culture while
maintaining one’s own identity) is important;
• ‘cultural awareness-raising is an aspect of values education’ (Maley’s
introduction to Tomalin and Stempleski, 1993: 3);
• intercultural language education should cast a critically reflective eye
on its own workings.
Things to be considered while
implementing…
• Defining intercultural communicative competence (the
‘savoir’/knowledge)
• The desirability of intercultural learning
• Learners as ethnographers
• The needs of different learners
• Replacing ‘native speaker competence’ with ‘intercultural
communicative competence’.
• Task design in the intercultural classroom