Pribumi Muda

Language Teaching is Culture Teaching

As L2 and FL educators, we teach and our students learn about the culture of the L2/FL whether or not we include it overtly in the curriculum. This point was made by McLeod (1976, p. 212) some years ago: "by teaching a language...one is inevitably already teaching culture implicitly". Sociolinguistics reveals why. In an article on discourse, for example, Brown (1990) questions whether or not language may be value-free or independent of cultural background. She concludes: "there are values, presuppositions, about the nature of life and what is good and bad in it, to be found in any normal use of language" (p. 13). Such normal language use is exactly what most L2 and FL instructors aim to teach.Beyond this perspective, Buttjes (1990, p. 55) refers to ethnographic language studies (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Poyatos, 1985; Peters and Boggs, 1986) and summarizes several reasons why "language and culture are from the start inseparably connected":

language acquisition does not follow a universal sequence, but differs across cultures;
the process of becoming a competent member of society is realized through exchanges of language in particular social situations;
every society orchestrates the ways in which children participate in particular situations, and this, in turn, affects the form, the function and the content of children's utterances;
caregivers' primary concern is not with grammatical input, but with the transmission of sociocultural knowledge;
the native learner, in addition to language, acquires also the paralinguistic patterns and the kinesics of his or her culture. (Buttjes, 1990, p. 55)

Having outlined these findings, Buttjes cautions readers that "as in the case of first vs. second language acquisition research, first and second culture acquisition differ in many respects" (1990, p. 55). Two of his further observations also explain just how language teaching is culture teaching:

language codes cannot be taught in isolation because processes of sociocultural transmission are bound to be at work on many levels, e.g. the contents of language exercises, the cultural discourse of textbooks (Kramsch, 1988), and the teacher's attitudes towards the target culture;
in their role of "secondary care givers" language teachers need to go beyond monitoring linguistic production in the classroom and become aware of the complex and numerous processes of intercultural mediation that any foreign language learner undergoes... (Buttjes, 1990, pp. 55-56)

Thus, from this evidence and that provided by Valdes (1990) in the paper referred to above, it is clear that language teaching is indeed culture teaching. Such a perspective is evident outside of the fields of applied linguistics and second language education as well, in writings on intercultural communication (Luce and Smith [1987]). Consider this view from outside of the L2 and FL education literature:

Culture and communication are inseparable because culture not only dictates who talks to whom, about what, and how the communication proceeds, it also helps to determine how people encode messages, the meanings they have for messages, and the conditions and circumstances under which various messages may or may not be sent, noticed, or interpreted... Culture...is the foundation of communication. (Samovar, Porter, & Jain, 1981, p. 24)

We should and do teach our students the L2 or FL culture in our classes when our goal is communicative competence. Not only is culture part and parcel of the process, but the educational value of it within L2/FL education is great, as Byram (1988) argues.The question arises, however, that if language and culture are so intricately intertwined, why bother overtly focussing on culture when there are so many other aspects of the curriculum that need more attention? As Kramsch, Cain, and Murphy-Lejeune (1996) have answered this very question by outlining historical reasons for a discourse-based "culture as language and language as culture" pedagogy, the short answer here includes several points. First, though culture is implicit is what we teach, to assume that those who are 'learning the language' in our classes are also learning the cultural knowledge and skills required to be competent L2/FL speakers denies the complexity of culture, language learning, and communication. Second, we should include culture in our curriculum in an intentional manner in order to avoid the stereotyping and pitfalls Nemni (1992) has outlined. The third reason for expressly including culture in our L2/FL curriculum is to enable teachers to do a better job teaching culture and to be more accountable to students for the culture learning that takes place in our L2/FL classes.