The suggestion that language teaching has a cultural dimension is far from new. It dates back to the beginnings of modern language teaching in the nineteenth century, and of course to the teaching of the classics far beyond that. Unfortunately, the 'communicative turn' in language teaching, particularly in English as a Foreign Language, tended to emphasize speech act and discourse competence, rather than socio-cultural competence, even though this was a misinterpretation of the original definition proposed by Hymes.
The complexity and variation in our understanding of the culture concept has been echoed in the range of approaches, strategies and techniques that have been advocated for language and culture teaching. These approaches, strategies and techniques have aimed to highlight points of focus for learners and teachers as they engage with a complex topic. They have included strategies to enable learners to become more objective about their own culture and heritage, more aware of cultural aspects that are «hidden», lists of attributes said to be representative of a particular culture, tasks that are structured to help learners examine stereotypes, and specific techniques and procedures to provide insight and perspective, among others. However, there remain areas which are not sufficiently drawn out across contexts, especially as far as the particular relationship between culture learning and teaching and the differential application of new technologies is concerned.
In linguistic research works much attention is paid to cognitive, ethnocultural/sociocultural and linguacultural aspects, communicative conduct (I. A. Sternin, O. E. Porokhov), communicative style, nonverbal communication (E.Hall, I. Arias, S. Pennycook), structure and content of linguistic personality (G. I. Bogin, V. A. Maslova), theory of discourse (J.Austin, J.Searle, I. A. Zimnaia, M.Stubbs, J.Gumperz, C.Roberts, E. Davies, T. Jupp, H.Grice, T.A. van Deyk), understanding text and cultural meanings, linguacultural strategies of understanding foreign text (V. V. Krasnikh).
Theory and practice correlated teaching of language and culture is based on lingua-country study, sociocultural, cognitive, lingua-cultural and cross-cultural approaches.
Most methodologies with which foreign language educators are familiar focus on the development of language skills and do not address the teaching of culture per se. Historically, when cultural issues were addressed, they frequently concentrated on great literature, history, or geography and were designed to broaden students' general liberal arts background.
There were a variety of methods and approaches to teaching foreign languages in history. All had advantages and disadvantages and change each other time by time. We can see cultural aspect in some of methods as grammar translation method, audio-lingual method and other approaches.
Researchers such as Wright contend that the most common approach to teaching about the target culture in the foreign language classroom is a one-way transmission of facts—the providing of information about the people, products, and customs of the target culture. In the history of culture and language teaching there were the following methods:
Galloway identifies four common approaches to culture instruction:
- The Frankenstein Approach: A taco from here, a flamenco dancer from there, a gaucho from here, a bullfight from there.
- The 4-F Approach: Folk dances, festivals, fairs and food.
- The Tour Guide Approach: The identification of monuments, rivers and cities.
The «By-the-Way» Approach: Sporadic lectures or bits of behavior selected indiscriminately to emphasize sharp differences. In this approach teachers share travel anecdotes or offer bits of information to illustrate a point.
Although these techniques all provide the opportunity to share cultural basics with learners, they stop far short of providing a holistic view of the culture. Indeed, the presentation of culture as a set of learnable «facts» may promote the notion of culture as a static construct, and it fails to «recognize the variability of behavior within the target culture community, the participative role of the individual in the creation of culture, or the interaction of language and culture in the making of meaning». Ignoring cultural variation promotes stereotyping.
New standards value culture learning as one of the 5 Cs (Communication, Cultures, Comparisons, Connections, and Communities); they also include Culture as an equal partner with Language in the Comparisons Goal; and they embed culture in each of the three remaining goals. However, although teachers believe strongly that culture learning is critical to language learning, a recent survey also revealed an apparent lack of systematic, in-depth teaching of culture and found that those surveyed generally had no conceptual cultural framework they used in organizing instruction. The proverbial «Culture Friday» and cultural tidbits casually imparted apparently dominate classroom instruction, in spite of teachers' belief in the importance of culture.
Sociolinguistic issues became more important with the introduction of communicative approaches to language teaching. Today teachers, parents, and syllabi alike assert that an important goal of studying other languages and cultures is to emphasize learning about other peoples' way of life, and states across the country have supported language education in the interest of national security. Although favorable attitudes toward the target culture are positively associated with language acquisition, research does not find the reverse to be true: language study alone does not appear to promote positive attitudes toward the target culture and its people. Others found that learners tended to compartmentalize their attitudes towards the study of the language and their attitudes towards the people who speak the language. Apparently, without specific instruction in seeking similarities between the native and target cultures, students fail to develop empathy for the native speakers of the language they are learning. Hall & Ramirez attribute this to the «fact that students do not perceive of themselves as cultural beings, that is, as having a culture».
Analysis of the present approaches shows that the most suitable approaches to teaching foreign languages are socio-cultural, cross-cultural, and cognitive. These approaches have the same essence and their peculiar states are alike because much attention is paid to the analyzes of intercultural units, oppositions, accentuation on the cross-cultural components, the problem of acculturation is touched upon and various models of developing intercultural competence, intercultural communicative competence, culture notification is worked out.
Idea of lingua-country study continued to expand by G. D. Tomakhin, he suggested to define graduation of background knowledge and pointed out that main object of lingua-country study as knowledge related with national culture, inherited in definite ethnic and language community. G. D. Tomakhin also expanded ideas of lexicography and gave interpretation of toponyms, antroponyms and many other realias of American people.
This approach gave stimulus to the development of the theory of intercultural communication and ideas of correlated language and culture learning. But in general lingua-country study had many unsolved problems which partially or fully solved in other works.
Language skills are also vital in improving understanding between people here and in the wider world, and in supporting global citizenship by breaking down barriers of ignorance and suspicion between nations. Learning other language gives us insight into the people, culture and traditions of other countries, and helps us to understand our own language and culture.
References:
- Hymes D. On Communicative Competence// Sociolinguistics: Selected readings/ U.K., Harmondworth: Penguin, 1972. — P. 260.
- Порохов Ю. Е., Стернин И. А. Русские: коммуникативное поведение. 3- е изд. — М., 2007. –328 c.
- Маслова В. А. Лингвокультурология: Учебное пособие. 3- е изд. — М., 2007. –208 с.
