Читать книгу Culture in Language Learning - Группа авторов - Страница 16

Among foreign languages, English occupies a special position by virtue of its world-wide spread. Within the European Union, English is taught in schools side by side with other foreign languages, but its value is different and so is its perceived usefulness. Although the teaching of English in European schools is still very much oriented toward British or American national culture, research on English as the lingua franca of continental Europe is gaining momentum (Seidlhofer 2003). This lingua franca is not necessarily a culture-free global English, but rather a supra-national European dialect that takes on the cultural specificities of each host culture.

In Europe, there is a boom of interest right now in the teaching of languages other than English. New avenues of research focus, as mentioned above, on the intercultural components of language learning but also on its ecological aspects (Fill & Mühlhäusler 2001) and on pluriculturalism as a dimension of plurilingualism (e.g., Zarate 2004, Busch 2004). This research draws heavily on insights from literary and cultural studies, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, anthropology, and from a long tradition of study abroad and student exchange. In Europe, language educators are particularly concerned about the effects of globalization and the weakening of national institutions on the teaching of foreign languages. Hans L. Hansen, a Humanities scholar from the University of Copenhagen, speaks for many when he says that foreign language teaching in an era of globalization (global market and global terrorism) means “reflecting theoretically upon the relation between entities like language, culture, identity, history and the self-knowledge and imaginary world pictures as they are represented in art and literature” (Hansen 2004a: 115). He envisages a new role for culture: “Foreign Language Studies must learn to conceive of culture as an open, multivoiced and dialogical interaction full of contradictions, rather than as the deterministic, homogeneous and closed structure that belonged to the era of the nation state” (Hansen 2004b: 9).

The current tensions between the creation of a European community geared to the global market and the europeanization of national communities geared to political national identities, are leading toward the creation of a “third sector”, i.e., a European multilingual public sphere in the media and in professional life that includes national, regional and local languages, minority and migrant languages, sign languages. This multilingual sphere or “sprachenfreundliches Umfeld” (Busch 2004: 164) is meant to sensitize Europeans of all walks of life to cultural diversity and encourage them to embrace public multilingualism and multiculturalism, understood as “a corrective against the interests of the nation state and a global market economy” (ibid.: 289, my translation). This also prepares them for the eventual emergence of a multilingual political European identity. It includes the screening of foreign films with subtitles, the tolerance to untranslated code-switches in public statements, the symbolic use of untranslated languages in greetings, leave takings etc., the airing of bilingual TV programs like ARTE. It includes efforts by the Council of Europe to move from an emphasis on translation and linguistic diversity to efforts to develop a plurilingual education based on critical language awareness, plurilingual identity formation, and intercultural understanding. This entails a turn toward a more hermeneutic, reflexive, interpretive kind of teaching, in which ‘text’ can serve as a common ground: conversational texts, written texts, visual texts, not as objects of philological exegeses or structural analyses but as dialogically constructed culture in action.

In the U.S., by contrast, the foundational field of research for all foreign language education is still second language acquisition (SLA) research. It has traditionally drawn its data predominantly from ESL or the beginning levels of foreign language instruction. Because of its mostly psycholinguistic and sociocognitive concerns, SLA research has not had much to say about the teaching of culture in language classes, except perhaps regarding learners’ motivation to acculturate into a target community of native speakers, as is the case with many ESL learners. SLA research has been less interested in studying the cultural benefits of study abroad than in exploring the uses of computer-mediated communication to learn about foreign cultures without going abroad (Warschauer & Kern 2000). It has aligned foreign language research with linguistics and psychology rather than with anthropology or cultural studies. It has thus exacerbated the split between the social sciences and the humanities, between language teachers and literature/cultural studies scholars in language departments at American universities. In the current political climate, U.S. federal funding is given in priority to research on the psycho- and sociolinguistic aspects of advanced language competencies for intelligence gathering purposes in the languages declared necessary for national security. It is not primarily concerned about their cultural or historical aspects.