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LANGUAGE teachers have radically changed their attitudes since World War II, and the direction of the change suggests a further evolution. In the 1950s, the contention that they ought to include the cultural context in their courses aroused their anger. They not only saw little need for this added burden, they were afraid of it. During the sixties the anger and fear gave way to more positive feelings. Among the causes were America's international involvement, reflected in the media, and increasing foreign travel. The Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), focusing on language alone, produced students so fluent that their social blunders were taken for insults, and the new language-and-area studies suggested a remedy. Student power forced changes in the curriculum, and students proved to be less interested in language and literature than in comparative life-styles.
By the seventies, most of the teachers at state conferences would claim to “bring in the culture.” What they brought in, however, was unorganized bits, mostly material details, with little that could lead to an understanding of a people's way of thinking and feeling. There was no thought of organizing research-based concepts that the student could apply in a new situation.
In the eighties, it became apparent that desultory cultural items were no answer to such problems as American competitiveness abroad, the competence of the electorate to support farsighted international policies, and the widespread foreign stereotypes of American insensitivity and arrogance in international relations. As early as 1977, Laurence Wylie pointed out the inadequacy of the cultural content in modern language courses. After analyzing this deficiency, he went on to suggest the remedy:
I don't really like the textbooks on culture; they're so fragmented: a little about French sports, a little bit about how to order coffee, … about structuralism, … about the châteaux of the Loire. It's not put together. … some history, some history of ideas, some literature and geography, and that's supposed to add up to an understanding of France. It doesn't at all… What I'd like to do is get the structure of French culture. (251)
The agenda for the next phase has two objectives: (1) to organize that understanding—no one argues that understanding can just as well be incoherent—and (2) to integrate it into the teaching of the language. The second objective follows from the first. Given the size of the task and the limited course time at our disposal, we must take advantage of the close relation between language and culture. Language can illustrate patterns of thought and behavior, bringing the abstract patterns to life. Concepts in turn can give insight into language. As a result, both grow more interesting, motivation is aroused, and learning becomes more efficient. If one accepts this scenario, what are the implications for department management?
Since the task before us culminates in curricular change, it calls for added work on the part of the whole staff. A first implication, suggested by my experience as a department chair for twenty-five years, is that departmental consensus on the overall objectives of the change must be achieved before committees start to revamp courses. This goal requires department-wide discussion, which also serves a second essential function: to give a voice in basic decisions to junior faculty members, who are a main source of idealism, new ideas, and patient labor. The chair bears a moral responsibility, however, to see that their willingness is not abused, a responsibility that leads to the delicate task of enlisting the cooperation of senior colleagues. Some may come to find the vision of new possibilities attractive as the departmental meetings progress, if the discussions are kept purposeful and as succinct as possible. But most will have to be persuaded individually, in a spirit of love and respect, that they have special contributions to make toward a change that is vital if the department and the humanities are to survive amid the present academic geopolitics of encroaching “international studies” and narrowing vocational interests. The chair may be tempted to sidestep the task of enlisting reluctant elders one by one, but such an evasion would betray their younger associates, as well as the department's role in the humanities.
The momentum of the eighties provides the basis for departmental consensus in that the sociocultural context of a language is essential, first, for communicative competence and, second, for the education of Americans today. Few still argue that the context is useless for communicative competence. The controversy has shifted to the question whether it will squeeze out literature and Culture with a capital C. There need be no conflict with literature, for literature is a main source of cultural manifestations. On the contrary, students can be interested in literature through their very real interest in different life-styles and in the problems of conflicting values that they discuss among themselves. Nor need there be conflict between studying everyday culture and also learning about a people's great achievements. Appreciation of another's cultural heritage is useful to communication: it creates a bond of congeniality.
It is easy for a language department to reach consensus on the proposition that foreign language study has an essential function in the cultural and international education of Americans. Our discipline alone gives experience of another culture in its own language. Without that experience, knowledge about intercultural differences remains superficial verbalization. True, one can learn perfectly well in one's own language that other languages require looking at situations through different grids of presuppositions. Likewise, one can easily resolve to be tolerant, to avoid ethnocentric reactions. But that good intention is too fragile to withstand the irritation of dealing with persons who misunderstand what seems self-evident, who insist on exasperating formalities, and so on. Only when knowledge about is put together with experience of at least one other culture can understanding supplant the ingrained notion that all other ways of life are inferior to “Number One.”
The unique educational role of language study is only slowly gaining recognition, but this process is partly in our control as language teachers. We can make much more evident that our courses are fulfilling that role, and we can thus acquire an exciting sense of a larger-than-departmental purpose.
What do we mean by cultural competence? Numerous persons have tried to answer that question by applying definitions of culture drawn from the social sciences, with some amateurish results. Meanwhile, specialists in the cultural aspect of language teaching and the related applied field of training for international business have been converging on a practical solution that simply uses what Laurence Wylie called for: the real structure of a culture. At the center of a sociocultural system is a code that determines the meaning of an act or an utterance for those who live in that system. Made up of a set of interrelated values, habits of thought, and presuppositions about human nature and society, the code forms a sort of grid through which one perceives reality and morality.
Consequently, to develop cultural competence, we need to teach students to recognize the values, habits of thought, and presuppositions they can expect to encounter and then to act accordingly. But practice in anticipating these central characteristics need not be limited to situations that call for action. They can be observed in all the manifestations of a culture, from the patterned behavior of individuals to their social institutions and from literature, the arts, and the media to the culture's typical research questions and methods. We have only to apply our powers of observation and enlist the intellectual curiosity of our students as we study the language and any authentic materials.
This approach toward understanding a culture entails two principles, which Alfred North Whitehead elegantly summed up in his injunction to seek generality but to distrust it. The first is a principle that Western thought has used from Thales on, in both science and religion: to posit a concept and refine it through successive approximations. The alternative is the approach of the Eastern philosophy, which seeks to impose no structure on reality, reducing the inevitable grid to the minimum in order to see the world as an undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. In describing that philosophy, however, F.S.C. Northrop noted that one cannot introduce Western technology into it without incurring the contradiction of adopting Western science's structures and generalizations. The second principle, to distrust generality, means here that we must keep constant contact with real individuals and situations in the foreign culture, continually asking how the organizing concepts apply to the diverse reality. This is the process that leads to understanding.
The Western principle of refining concepts involves two hazards: simplistic generalization, or stereotyping, and a confusion among the levels of useful generalization. There are in fact three levels: generalization about humanity as a whole (e.g., about universal human needs), about a single culture or subculture, and about individual differences. No individual can be predicted to follow any pattern completely. Generalizations about a culture yield only probabilities—useful ones, but always limited to the level between the universal and the unique.
Cultural competence involves something more than understanding a foreign culture and society: it requires an understanding of the basic tools for studying the phenomenon. Among these are opinion polls and other statistical surveys, each read with attention to its date and scope; field study carried on either within the culture area or at a distance (e.g., through pen or tape pals); and comparisons between cultures. Contrastive analysis, however, has an inherent danger when it means, as it often does, looking at aspects of the foreign culture against the backdrop of supposedly analogous details in the home culture. Unless one has experienced the coherence of the other system, “We do this, they do that” makes the foreign culture seem only a series of extrusions in all directions from the home culture, as if it had no core of its own. This sort of comparison confirms the expectation of ethnocentric students that the foreign way is “weird.”
Fortunately, the core elements of a foreign culture can be expressed in manageable form as a set of major values, each value surrounded, for the culture bearer, by a few habits of mind and presuppositions. The value the French place on intellectuality and intellectuals, for example, rests on a presupposition that appearances are to be distrusted: intellect is needed to penetrate to the hidden, inner reality. The same French value is colored by a habit of thought, the habit of seeking the context of a fact or event as an integral part of what is to be grasped. This process of relating fact to context takes one from the concrete to the abstract, so it is not surprising that the French praise their language's capacity for abstraction. Americans, in contrast, distrust abstraction and intellectuality; they call intellectuals “eggheads”; they see a fact or an event as a reality independent of any one context. The consequences pervade the two cultures. In teaching journalism French and American schools take opposite positions on the separability of factual report from editorial opinion—the French find it naive to claim objectivity. The two legal systems use contrasting rules for the admissibility of context as evidence.
The device of grouping a value with its attendant presuppositions and habits of thought makes the foreign code much easier to understand and remember. Given such refinements of method, it becomes quite practicable for undergraduate education to include the study of a foreign culture and, in addition, the conceptual tools for cultural analysis.
Departments that undertake this curricular remodeling will find help at hand, first of all, in defining cultural competence. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) has resumed development of the cultural component that was omitted from the 1984 edition of its Guidelines , and the AATF Commission on Professional Standards has defined cultural competence at two levels, “basic” and “superior.” The “basic” level can well serve as a benchmark for the undergraduate major. To answer the question, How do I go about developing competence in a foreign culture? the AATF report includes a selective bibliography, in which the few items specific to French can easily be replaced by analogous ones for other cultures (25). The answer is the same for a teacher as for a student; pedagogical competence constitutes an entirely separate body of knowledge and skills.
The resources for remodeling the curriculum to include culture have been brought together in the work papers of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The inherent, interactive relation between language and culture patterns needs only to be exploited by such devices as those Robert Lafayette summarizes (56–60). For him, these must include discussing the culture wholly in its own language. Claire Kramsch insists on the necessity of concepts for interpreting the facts of a culture. A menu from a German restaurant, she observes, is indeed an authentic text, but “the cultural authenticity of menus derives from their being imbedded in a host of social and symbolic relations …” (84).
Almost all textbooks still fail to deal with such relations, and Kramsch has analyzed the diverse reasons for this failure (77–82). For one thing, concepts are controversial, while textbooks are presumed to be authoritative repositories of literal truth. To bring about culturally satisfying textbooks will require the combined efforts of publishers, authors, and teachers.
Teachers and departments can spur progress by telling publishers' representatives their criteria for selecting a book. For example, the text should provide, in the foreign language, the means of interpreting the anecdotes and statistics it presents. It should place cultural manifestations in the context of their own value system, habits of thought, and prevalent assumptions and not contrast isolated details with characteristics of the student's home culture. It should place the whole in a multicultural perspective. To show that the author avoids the “sin of dangerous incompleteness,” against which Peter Patrikis warns in the lead chapter of the Northeast Conference volume referred to above (18), the book should include a sociocultural index as well as a grammatical index and lexicon. The study of grammar, vocabulary, and culture should advance together, each contributing in its way to the cyclical reentry of the central concepts.
For a course in which some of the teaching assistants have little experience, an instructor's manual should answer questions about both the linguistic and the cultural topics of the lessons. If it is agreed that the class should be conducted in the foreign language—the only way to make it count toward developing communicative ability—then the textbook, manual, and accompanying tapes should provide the expressions needed for leading discussions. Audiotapes should help students understand the reading matter and also give abundant auditory experience of the conversational language needed in class. These functions can both be served, for example, by having two anchorpersons discuss the cultural material, differing in viewpoint, explaining to each other the difficult parts of an essay, and taking on personal identities as their lives impinge on the sessions in the recording studio.
The audiotapes should be integrated into the presentation of the language and culture. Students therefore need to be able to hear the tapes conveniently, either in a language laboratory or on their own cassettes, so that they will be encouraged to listen to a tape more than once. While audiotapes enable students to concentrate on listening comprehension, only audiovisual materials can demonstrate overall behavior patterns. These are consequently indispensable for modeling the rhythmic interaction between native speakers of a language. A one- or two-minute clip can show students the handicap they incur if they condition the foreign words to the gestural components of their own language. If a clip of this sort is not provided with the textbook, the instructor's manual should include it on a list of recommended materials and equipment for the user to have on hand. Another item that belongs on this list is the tristandard videotape player needed for tape-pal correspondence.
Lastly, the textbook should go beyond the one foreign language and culture, equipping students with the tools of cultural analysis and instilling a concern for an enlightened multicultural outlook.
Beginning instructors should have already achieved “basic” cultural competence, and teaching assistants should be helped to reach that level. All graduate students of a language, in fact, need this cross-cultural background, whether for an international career or just for a role of enlightened leadership in a community and in the national electorate. Those who specialize in one region of a culture area or one in part of its population will of course have to supplement the basic competence with further knowledge and experience.
New fields of research must be recognized as legitimate. Examples are research that formulates the values, habits of thought, and presuppositions manifested in a literary work as seen in the light of its authentic cultural context, compared with the effect of a foreign context; research that relates literature to other expressions of a culture, in the arts or in social institutions; research that identifies the skills and knowledge requisite for a given level of cultural competence; research that examines students' difficulties in grasping a foreign cultural code well enough to recognize it in concrete examples; research that determines whether students have acquired the desired competence and attitudes.
Past research in such fields has sometimes been flawed because the researcher lacked the prerequisite theoretical background. Graduate education today needs to be flexible enough so that a good student who is motivated to develop an interdisciplinary competence extending into the arts or the social sciences can incorporate the necessary courses in an acceptable degree program.
Beginning teachers should start early to work toward developing “superior” professional qualifications. This goal need not involve taking courses: helpful and enjoyable reading is proposed in the AATF and Northeast Conference reports. Living in the foreign culture is also essential, and quite feasible: a department hardly needs to supplement the assistance offered young teachers for study abroad, at least in the common languages. If one plans what to observe and the questions to ask while visiting a country, one can learn a great deal in a summer. The insights achieved may even be worth publishing.
Is it hazardous to one's career to concentrate one's research in this field? The prudent answer has been that the risk is exceptionally high. How much has the situation changed?
Change is evident in the way the supporting public views cultural study: the national self-interest, it is now recognized, requires persons who know a foreign language “and culture” to conduct foreign business and diplomacy. The perceived need is not only for culture courses in the language major but also for an international component in general education. This theme has persisted in the public reports criticizing American education throughout the past decade. Young people provide a telling index of trends, and the shift in student interest shows strikingly in the rapid growth of enrollment in international studies, both as a major program and as an elective subject, all without benefit of a requirement for graduation.
Language departments generally adapt slowly to changes outside their tradition. The first specialists in Latin American literature and then those in linguistics were penalized for straying afield. Departmental leadership always has to overcome the fear of innovation, which appears as the enemy of security. But this time, the feared innovation is precisely the source of security, under conditions that are destroying the former source—the once stable demand to study literature for its own sake. Student interest and public support are shifting away from language departments that fail to include cultural competence in their domain. A faculty specialist in the cultural context thus becomes the department's insurance against the loss of that interest and support.
The new fields of inquiry listed in the preceding section permit intellectually demanding research that can produce needed results by rigorous methods. Once the arbiters of promotion in a department promise to give a fair hearing to such efforts, it is the researcher's responsibility to acquire the necessary competence, to pick subjects that are manageable as well as significant, and to make sure that the plan of inquiry is sound. Those who undertake such work are no longer in uncharted territory, nor do they lack experienced advisers to consult.
A college or university offers potential benefits that a language department cannot afford to overlook. One such benefit would be sufficient class time for the cultural component. With many first- and second-year language courses limited to three class hours a week, instructors must choose between communication and culture. Often the department is reluctant to protest this restriction for fear of losing a language requirement. Departments in other disciplines sometimes argue that language does not deserve more time because it is only a tool subject. The substantive value of language-and-culture courses provides a sound justification for increased class time. To save the language requirement, one resourceful department asked for additional time in the form of a “culture lab.” As for the requirement, it is a mixed blessing in the long run: it eventually self-destructs because it protects complacency. A surer source of a department's security is the uncoerced interest of students.
A second potential benefit relates to the time consumed in teaching the rudimentary terminology of grammar. Not that language teachers can rightly complain about this. Every discipline has to teach basic concepts, and many of our students are grateful for this teaching. But we need all the time possible for language practice and cultural material if we are to fulfill even a reasonable expectation of competence. Fortunately, the view is gaining ground that students are more likely to master English if they are taught more than corrective, surface grammar. Students of English need to learn about sentence structure if we want to combat the emerging popular rule, for example, that a verb agrees with the nearest preceding noun: “The reason for these errors are. . . . ” The current emphasis on English composition in schools and colleges provides an opportunity for English and foreign language teachers to share the teaching of deep grammar.
Beyond our institutions, in our relations with schools, lies another neglected opportunity to improve the teaching of both language and culture. How much we can add to the students' development obviously depends on where we begin. We can benefit by taking part in collaborative planning with the schools. The articulation of programs from preschool to college has suffered from the lack of sustained contact between teachers at the successive age levels. Academic Alliances, an organization of school-college collaboratives founded in 1984, provides a model for such contact. Collaborare, the newsletter for Academic Alliances in Foreign Languages and Literatures, is issued three times a year (for further information write or call Academic Alliances, PO Box 1368, Tarrytown, NY 10591-3796; [914] 332-4917).
It is in the interest of higher education to catalyze progress toward schooling children in a second language before their neurological capacity for the spontaneous imitation of speech deteriorates—about at puberty. Exciting possibilities for our field, as it expands its horizon, are suggested by Alfred North Whitehead's little classic, The Aims of Education. The elementary school age, he proposes, should be a cycle of exploration and discovery. The intellectual curiosity thus generated can then support a secondary school cycle of filling in fields of knowledge, for which teenagers have a special capacity. There is room here for knowledge of a foreign culture. This cycle in turn prepares for one devoted to “reflective synthesis,” which Whitehead thought appropriate for young people of college age. Reflective synthesis would indeed make a rewarding collegial pursuit for teachers and students together—provided that the students are well enough informed by then to take a responsible part.
If the concern for cultural competence broadens higher education's partnership with the schools, how does it affect the institution's relations with the community and the alumni? A language department certainly becomes more relevant to foreign trade and diplomacy. New sources can then be tapped for scholarship aid and for an international exchange of interns in business, banking, government, technology, and the sciences. Private organizations become involved in finding host families for the incoming students, whose families, in turn, open their homes to our students. As the exchanges spread to other departments, they create new joint interests and support. If the college town has a sister city in one of the language areas concerned—and it is no longer unusual to have several sister cities—the resources of municipal governments are brought into the picture as well as commercial interests. A university-town sister city facilitates the exchange of student groups and faculty members. The very process and difficulties of developing a sister-city network, moreover, provide a real-life laboratory experience of another culture.
The agenda I have proposed admittedly surpasses what has been possible thus far. Yet a decade of reports critical of American education shows a persistent trend favoring more serious teaching and learning; and as a part of this trend, foreign languages “and cultures” are regularly singled out for encouragement.
The author is Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. This article is based on a paper presented at the ADFL Seminar West, 18–20 June 1987, in Park City, Utah.
American Association of Teachers of French. The Teaching of French, a Syllabus of Competence: The Preliminary Report of the Commission on Professional Standards. Spec. issue of AATF National Bulletin 13 (Oct. 1987): 1-31.
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Guidelines [the cultural component omitted pending further research]. Hastings-on-Hudson: ACTFL, 1984.
———. Provisional Proficiency Guidelines. Hastings-on-Hudson: ACTFL, 1982.
Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Toward a New Integration of Language and Culture. Middlebury: Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 1988.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1929.
Wylie, Laurence. “An Interview with Laurence Wylie.” Contemporary French Civilization 5(1977): 211–53.
© 1988 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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