Republic of the Philippines

Cavite State University

Imus campus
Cavite Civic Center, Palico IV, Imus, Cavite
(046) 471-66-07 / (046) 471-67-70 / (046) 471-686-4349
www.cvsu.edu.ph

Materials
for Cultural Awareness

A Written Report about the Development of Materials for Cultural Awareness.

A partial requirement for the subject BSEE 26A: Language Learning Materials
Development

Submitted by:

BSEE 3B – Group 9

Andrade, Eunice P.
De Leon, Jaycee M.
Ramos, Feliza Mae P.
Ugay, Dan Timothy T.
Hallare, Miracle Joy B.
Rey-Hipolito, Josephine Therese P.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction to Culture-specific coursebook ................................................................. 3

1.1 What is culture-specific course book? ..................................................................... 3

2 Culture in language as the fifth skill................................................................................. 5

2.1 The Diversity of Culture .............................................................................................. 6

2.2 How to develop the materials? (GUIDE): ................................................................ 7

3 The Culture of language and the Language of Culture ............................................... 7

4 Developing Culture-sensitive materials..........................................................................10

5 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................11

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1 INTRODUCTION TO CULTURE-SPECIFIC COURSEBOOK

One consequence of the ‘communicative turn’ taken by ELT since the late
1970s has been the marginalization and at times the complete exclusion, of
culturally specific content in published teaching materials. The shift towards a
functional approach to EFL teaching, driven by needs analysis and predictable
performance objectives, has coincided with developing awareness of the
growing role of English as an international language. In this climate, it is hardly
surprising that cultural specificity is seen at best as a luxury and at worst as an
irrelevance. Cunningsworth (1984) stated the case against ‘the culture-specific
coursebook’ in terms that clearly continue to resonate with major ELT publishers:

A limitation of the culture-specific coursebook is that it will only be of

relevance to students who understand the cultural background in which it is set .
. . Indeed . . . a strong portrayal of British life might well prove to be an impediment
rather than a help to the learner . . . The [learner’s] time would be better spent
learning the language rather than the structuring of the social world in which the
learner is never likely to find himself. (1984: 61–2)

1.1 WHAT IS A CULTURE-SPECIFIC COURSEBOOK?

Learning a foreign language involves more than mastering the language in
question linguistically. Since culture and language are inseparable, any
coursebook developed for foreign language teaching should take into
consideration the cultural aspects of the language to be taught.

To develop cultural awareness alongside language awareness, materials

need to provide more than a token acknowledgment of cultural identity (‘Now
write about your country’) and address more thoroughly the kind of cultural
adjustment that underlies the experience of learning a foreign language. One

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powerful means of raising this kind of awareness in learners is through literary texts
which mimic, or more directly represent, experiences of cultural estrangement.

However, the pedagogical implications extend beyond issues of content:

if culture is seen as the expression of beliefs and values, and if language is seen
as the embodiment of cultural identity, then the methodology required to teach
a language needs to take account of ways in which the language expresses
cultural meanings. An integrated approach to teaching language and culture,
as well as attending to language as a system and cultural information, will focus
additionally on culturally significant areas of language and on the skills required
by the learner to make sense of cultural differences.

An enhanced language syllabus that takes account of cultural specificity

would be concerned with aspects of language that are generally neglected, or
that at best tend to remain peripheral in course materials:

• Connotation
• Idiom
• the construction of style and tone
• rhetorical structure, critical language awareness
• translation.

The familiar set of language skills would be augmented by ethnographic and

research skills designed to develop intercultural awareness.

There are encouraging signs in some recently published coursebooks of greater

cultural relativism and more pluralistic representations of English-speaking
cultures. But as long as courses continue to be produced for a global market and
construed exclusively in terms of language training, such developments will
remain largely cosmetic. This chapter will refer to several recent projects which
suggest that the way ahead for integrated language-and-culture materials lies in
various kinds of country-specific joint publishing ventures.

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2 CULTURE IN LANGUAGE AS THE FIFTH SKILL

There have been numerous nominations for the coveted title of 'fifth skill',
ranging from ICT literacy to self-directed learning, but it may be argued that these
are all 'add-ons' to the four basic language skills. Kramsch (1993) claims an
altogether higher status for culture:

Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill tacked on, so to

speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in
the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language
learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-
won communicative competence, and challenging their ability to make sense of
the world around them. (1993. 1)

The underlying implication is that language and culture are inextricably

intertwined.

• To treat language - in the manner of most mainstream language courses,

as a value-free code.
• To teach language - that is imbued with cultural nuance as though it were
purely a means of instrumental transaction.

In this sense, cultural awareness becomes not the fifth, but the first skill,
informing every step of the Language learning process, night from day one
Communicative language teaching, in its emphasis on authentic text and
genuine interaction, privileges meaning over form, but in excluding cultural
meaning.

Culture, as Raymond Williams points out, is one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language (1983; 87) Derived from the concept

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of cultivation in agriculture, it became synonymous in the eighteenth century with
civilization.

To be “cultured” or, metaphorically, “cultivated” was to be civilized, and this

notion of culture as “high culture” survives in the title of the Ministry of Culture, in
the “culture” supplements of broadsheet newspapers, and collocations such as
“culture vulture”.

However, resistance to the dominant. the monolithic European version of

culture suggested by association with 'civilization' can be traced back as far as
the late eighteenth century in Germany when Johann Gottfried Herder (1791)
insisted on the need to consider 'cultures' rather than 'culture' in the singular.

The 'life and institutions' approach to transmitting cultural knowledge as an

adjunct to language teaching draws on the tradition of culture as civilization. A
more egalitarian view of culture as a whole way of life' has trickled down into
some ELT coursebooks, where iconic, tourist brochure images of Britishness have
been replaced by material that is more representative of the multicultural diversity
of contemporary British life.

2.1 THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURE

The experience of learning another language is more than simply the acquisition
of an alternative means of expression. It involves a process of acculturation, akin
to the effort required of the traveler, striving to come to terms with different social
structures, different assumptions, and different expectations.

This sensation of seeing one’s language and culture retracted through the
medium of a foreign language and culture reflects what was described by the
Russian Formalist critic, Viktor Shklovsky (1917), writing about Tolstoy’s literary
technique, as ‘defamiliarization’, or ’making the familiar seem strange.

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For the majority of learners encountering a foreign language for the first time, their
own culture is so familiar, so much a given, that they ‘do not see it. Their culture
provides them with one way of looking at the world and their language with one
way of articulating that perception.

2.2 HOW DO DEVELOP THE MATERIALS? (GUIDE):

Stimulate literary texts that employ deliberate strategies of defamiliarization.

Encourage them not simply to observe the difference in the other culture, but to
become less ethnocentric and more culturally relativist.

Promote greater intercultural awareness.

3 THE CULTURE OF LANGUAGE AND THE LANGUAGE OF CULTURE

The focus of most teaching materials remains fixed on the content of these
resources rather than on the choices that speakers (and writers) make in the
course of social interaction. The cultural dimension of language consists of
elements that are normally classed as ‘native speaker intuition’ and which may
be achieved by only the most advanced students. As native speakers, we
function well in our own speech communities by using pragmatic awareness to
make suitable and relevant language selections.

This awareness may not be wholly determined by cultural factors, but it is culturally
conditioned.

It includes elements such as forms of address, the expression of politeness,

discourse conventions, and situational constraints on conversational behavior.

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Grice’s ‘cooperative principle’ (1975) and Lakoff’s ‘politeness principle’ (1973)
have up to now made remarkably little impression on EFL materials.

Many coursebook texts and tasks requiring oral interaction tend to be situated
in neutral, culture-free zones, where the learner is only called upon to ‘get the
message across’.

The coursebook inspired by Lewis's work (Dellar and Hocking, Innovations, 2000),
emphasizes the significance of collocation and lexical phrases, partly subsumed
under the category of ‘spoken grammar’, while key 26. Materials for Cultural
Awareness 431 elements of a traditional structure are retained under the less
dominant rubric of ‘traditional grammar’.

This emphasis on how lexical items cluster together via use is a key design
approach for products that mix culture and language learning.

Given that lexical phrases are context-dependent and that contexts are
culture-specific, the repeated association of lexical phrases with particular
settings of use will nurture the sociolinguistic ability to employ the phrases in the
proper situations. (2001: 52–3)

Another lexical area that might profitably be explored by materials writers is

suggested by research into cognition and cross-cultural semantics (Wierzbicka,
1991; 1992; 1997). Her assessments are based on vast data collections illustrating
the use of particular things in numerous contexts. She then concludes on the
cultural distinctiveness and semantic constraints of key ideas. This highly inductive

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technique may appeal to learners who are continually exploring meaning,
although unstructured. The increasing availability of affordable concordance
software should also allow coursebooks to be open-ended and provide learners
with the means to explore their own further exploration.

More extensive translation activities could raise learners' awareness of how

ideas may be organized differently at text level, such as translating a source text
and comparing its structure with a parallel L1 text on the same topic and genre,
or using a ‘double translation' procedure, i.e., translating into L1 and then back
into L2, comparing the second version with the L2 original.

Adjusting to diverse rhetorical frameworks is a challenge while learning a new

language. Learners must receptively and productively deal with a word- and
sentence-level differences and textual arrangement. Yet different assumptions
about the structure of spoken and written language can engender a sense of
cultural and linguistic estrangement that all learners must overcome, often
without much help from course materials.

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4 DEVELOPING CULTURE-SENSITIVE MATERIALS

The construction of cultural ‘third places’ is essentially a critical activity, as it

forces learners to become aware of ways in which language is socially and culturally
determined. Van Lier’s (1995) definition is more comprehensive and should alert us to
the fact that language is always ideologically loaded and texts are always to be
mistrusted:

“Language awareness can be defined as an understanding of the human faculty of

language and its role in thinking, learning, and social life. It includes an awareness of
power and control through language, and of the intricate relationships between
language and culture.” (1995: xi)

Critical Language Awareness (CLA) proceeds from the belief that language is always
value-laden and that texts are never neutral. As readers, we should always be
‘suspicious’ of texts and prepared to challenge or interrogate them.

The CLA approach implies ‘a methodology for interpreting texts which address
ideological assumptions as well as propositional meaning’ (Wallace, 1992) It would lead
them to ask and answer crucial questions about a text: Who produced it? Who was it
produced for? In what context was it published?

The British Council has joined forces with local publishers in a number of countries in
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to produce textbooks (in Romania Crossing Cultures,
1998; in the Czech Republic Lifestyles, 2000; in Hungary Zoom In, 2001), a cultural studies
syllabus (in Bulgaria Branching Out,1998),1 and teachers’ resource materials (British
Studies Materials for English Teachers in Poland, 2000).

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Given the major publishers’ abiding concentration on marketing ‘one size fits all’ global
coursebooks, local and regional initiatives such as those described above seem to offer
the most promising ways of developing and producing materials that fulfill the ideal of
teaching language and culture.

5 CONCLUSION

ELT continues to be dominated by international coursebooks for the reason of being

an international language following international standards. However, this idealism is far
from realistic. English language teaching is meant to teach those who have English as
their secondary language and for them to successfully learn the language, it should be
taught in a way that is close to their understanding. We, teachers, play a vital role in
bridging the knowledge from those international books to the minds and hearts of our
students. We can do this by finding supplementary learning materials so that the lesson
could be adapted to the culture and situation of the students. Coursebooks provide
invaluable resources such as topics, texts, visuals, language, and activities that enable
teachers and students to structure learning. The learning materials from the coursebooks
serve as the frame of the curriculum. It would be then built and molded by the teachers
with the use of supplementary materials to cater to the needs and adapt it to the culture
of the students. One of the effective ways for students to learn a language is that the
students must be able to relate to the lesson and apply it in real-life situations. It is our
responsibility to create such situations in the classroom for effective learning to happen.

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