Читать книгу Culture in Language Learning - Группа авторов - Страница 8

As a humanistic concept, culture is the product of a canonical print literacy acquired in school; it is synonymous with a general knowledge of literature and the arts. Also called ‘big C’ culture, it is the hallmark of the cultivated middle-class. Because it has been instrumental in building the nation-state during the 19^th century, big C culture, as the national patrimony, has been promoted by the nation state and its institutions, e.g., schools and universities. It is the culture traditionally taught with standard national languages. Teaching about the history, the institutions, the literature and the arts of the target country embeds the target language in the reassuring continuity of a national community that gives it meaning and value. The fact that in the U.S. foreign languages are still taught for the most part in departments of foreign language and literature and that the curriculum for foreign language majors still puts a heavy emphasis on the study of literature is a reminder that language study was originally subservient to the interests of philologists and literary scholars. In the 1980s, with the advent of communicative language teaching, the humanistic concept of culture gave way to a more pragmatic concept of culture as way of life. But the prestige of big C culture has remained, if only as lieux de mémoire in Internet chatrooms named, for example, Versailles, Madison Avenue or Piccadilly – cultural icons of symbolic distinction.