Page 280 - Beyond Methods

268 Raising cultural consciousness
its orientation, culture teaching played a rather subterranean role in most L2 education. It became part of what Micheal Byram (1989) has called “the hidden curriculum,” indirectly seeking to create in the learner an empathy toward and an appreciation for the culture of the target language community. This hidden agenda has been the order of things from time immemorial. In a comprehensive review of twenty-five centuries of language teaching, Louis Kelly (1966, p. 378) has pointed out that “the cultural orientation of language teaching has always been one of its unstated aims” (emphasis added).
According to a more recent review by H. H. Stern (1992), culture teaching has generally included a cognitive component, an affective component, and a behavioral component. The cognitive compo- nent relates to various forms of knowledge—geographical knowl- edge, knowledge about the contributions of the target culture to world civilization, and knowledge about differences in the way of life as well as an understanding of values and attitudes in the L2 community. The affective component relates to L2 learners’ curios- ity about and empathy for the target culture. The behavioral com- ponent relates to learners’ ability to interpret culturally relevant be- havior, and to conduct themselves in culturally appropriate ways.
A focal point of the cognitive, affective, and behavioral compo- nents of teaching culture has always been the native speaker of the target language. As Stern (1992) reiterates, “One of the most impor- tant aims of culture teaching is to help the learner gain an under- standing of the native speaker’s perspective” (p. 216). It is a matter of the L2 learner “becoming sensitive to the state of mind of indi- viduals and groups within the target language community” (p. 217). The teacher’s task, then, is to help the learner “create a network of mental associations similar to those which the items evoke in the na- tive speaker” (p. 224). The overall objective of culture teaching, then, is to help L2 learners develop the ability to use the target language in culturally appropriate ways for the specific purpose of empathiz- ing and interacting with native speakers of the target language.
Such an approach is based on a limited view of culture in at least two important ways. First, it narrowly associates cultural identity with national identity or linguistic identity. That is, it considers all the people belonging to a particular nation (e.g., the United States) speaking a particular language (e.g., English) as belonging to a par- ticular culture. It ignores multicultural and subcultural variations within national or linguistic boundaries. We learn from the works