Читать книгу Culture in Language Learning - Группа авторов - Страница 9

With the focus now on communication and interaction in social contexts, the most relevant concept of culture since the 1980s has been that of ‘little c’ culture, also called ‘small cultures’ (Holliday 1999) of everyday life. It includes the native speakers’ ways of behaving, eating, talking, dwelling, their customs, their beliefs and values. Research in the 1980s was deeply interested in cross-cultural pragmatics and the sociolinguistic appropriateness of language use in its authentic cultural context. To study the way native speakers used their language for communicative purposes, the Herderian equation one language = one culture was maintained and teachers were enjoined to teach rules of sociolinguistic use the same way they taught rules of grammatical usage (see functional-notional syllabi of the 1970s), i.e., through modeling and role-playing. Even though it now related to the variety of native speakers’ uses of language in everyday life, culture was seen as pretty monolithic, like the native speaker him/herself. Teaching culture has meant teaching the typical, sometimes stereotypical, behaviors, foods, celebrations and customs of the dominant group or of that group of native speakers that is the most salient or exotic to foreign eyes. Striking in this concept of culture is the maintenance of the focus on national characteristics and the lack of historical depth.

The sociolinguistic concept of culture takes on various forms depending on whether the language taught is a foreign, second, or heritage language. In foreign language (FL) classes taught outside of any direct contact with native speakers, culture is mostly of the practical, tourist kind with instructions on how to get things done in the target country. In second language (SL) classes taught in the target country or in native speaker run institutions abroad (e.g., British Council, Goethe Institut, Alliance Française), culture can also take the form of exposure to debates and issues of relevance to native speakers in the target country, or of discussions about living and working conditions for immigrants. In heritage language (HL) classes taught to native speakers who wish to connect with their ancestral roots, culture is the very raison d’être of language teaching. It is, not, however, without presenting major difficulties when the heritage community has either lost much of its original everyday culture (e.g., Native American languages, see Hinton 1994), or when its speakers belong to a community that historically no longer exists (e.g., Western Armenian or Yiddish). The teaching of culture in HL classes is very much linked to identity politics (Taylor 1994).