Methodology in Language Learning: Cultural Counselor

 

We need to unpack what is meant by culture because this is a term in common usage, but with a variety of different meanings. Second, we need to examine the roles teachers and learners can take in the language classroom. As we showed in the vignette above, teacher and learner roles may be culturally determined and learners may bring to the classroom different expectations of their own and their teachers’ roles. Further, teacher and learner roles may be assigned—by the institution and its expectations of what is appropriate behavior for teachers and learners.

 

 

By its very nature, ELT is an intercultural enterprise. Learners are learning a language so they can interact with English speakers from around the world. In fact, given the much larger number of learners in the Expanding Circle, it is most likely that learners will interact with NNSs, rather than NSs. The reality of English as a global language is that a Belgian engineer may be working for a Japanese company building a dam in India or a Chinese company may be building an underground railway line in Colombia. In addition, the ESL classroom is usually multicultural and multilingual. Interactions in the classroom are intercultural. In the Expanding Circle, while the teacher and learner often share the same cultural heritage, often an expatriate NS teaches there or is assigned for conversation classes. 

 

 

Approaches to culture vary. On one level, people refer to big C and little c culture. The former refers to a view of culture as contributions to civilization (architecture, art, literature, music, and so on), the latter to our everyday lives (what we like to call the fiestas, famous people, and food view). Both approaches are content oriented, viewing culture as knowledge that can be examined and taught as a subject. In other words, culture is more than an accretion of facts, it is a process. It is refferred to a sense of culture as the process by which people make sense of their lives, a process always involved in struggles over meaning and representation. 

 

We take this approach to culture as being more appropriate for ELT, we also find some of the findings of those who have studied culture and cultural differences as content to be useful in our work as teachers. One of the most useful models describes culture as the collective programming of the mind, of habitus, that is, the system of permanent and transferable tendencies. This definition views culture not only as static, but also as uncontested. Despite this, his extensive research in over 40 countries has uncovered a number of useful continua to describe different cultures. These dimensions are:

 

1.        individualism-collectivism—relations between the individual and his/her fellow

2.        masculinity-femininity—division of roles and values

3.        uncertainty avoidance—more or less need to avoid uncertainty about the future

4.        power (distance)—distance between individuals at different levels of hierarchy

5.        future orientation—long-term versus short-term orientation to life.

 

These dimensions are self-explanatory, except for masculinity-femininity, which compares the assertiveness and materialism of masculinity with the values around the warmth of social relationships and caring for the weak of femininity - identified gender egalitarianism, assertiveness, performance orientation, and humane orientation as dimensions within the broader category of masculinity-femininity. Even if culture is considered as a process of constant struggle over meaning, there is still the issue of the relationship between language and culture. This relationship is also contested. Some take a deterministic view in which language is culturally determined and constrains one’s view of the world; others take the view that “there is a fairly clear distinction between linguistic knowledge and culture knowledge,and that one can indeed acquire one of these without the other”

 

In the role of culture in computer-assisted language learning, we articulate an overarching approach that seeks to encompass all the facets of culture. The framework, provides a useful analytical tool for ELT teachers as they strive to understand the contexts in which they work. These are:

1.        Culture as elemental. All people have their own culture, but we are often unaware of our own cultural orientations and may project them onto others. So, in learning another language, learners need to first understand their own culture.

2.        Culture as relative. Culture is not absolute. One can understand a culture only in relation to other cultures. So, “the culture learner is almost inevitably drawn towards an approach which contrasts what ‘they’ do with what ‘we’ do”

 

 

3.        Culture as group membership. All people are members of multiple groups, with their own particular culture and language use. So, teachers need to help learners understand these different memberships and the consequences of joining particular groups, and learners need to decide which group memberships they want to aspire to.

4.        Culture as contested. Cultures are challenged at many levels, from the national (the so-called clashes of civilization) to the individual (culture shock or the choice of which English to learn or not learn). These contests all take place through language. 

 

5.        Culture as individual (variable and multiple). “Culture is a variable concept and understandings of ostensibly the same culture will differ from one person to the next”. How each person represents their culture is personal and individual. So, learners need to explore their representations and share them with other learners.

 

Despite the amount of research and discussion about the role of culture in language learning, some have argued that teachers can become overly sensitive to cultural differences and ascribe cultural explanations to learner behavior when in fact its basis is quite different and the learner as an individual gets overlooked. They (and we) are concerned that learners will be stereotyped. While we agree that it is vital for the teacher to view each learner as an individual, an understanding of one’s own culture and how culture frames and is framed by our seeing, being, behaving, and communicating is important if teachers are to be sensitive to their contexts and avoid the types of behavior of the teacher in the vignette.

 

In some teaching contexts, teachers have the freedom to adopt roles and give learners roles depending on the teaching goals. In other contexts teachers are con- strained by the institutional requirements or broader cultural expectations of appropriate roles. 

When teachers accept their role as technicians and fail to challenge the ways in which educational curricula correspond to the demands of industry or the means by which schooling reproduces existing class, race, and gender relations in our society, they run the risk of transmitting to subalternized student populations the message that their subordinate roles in the social order are justified and inviolable

 

 

Additionally, learners themselves may have preconceived notions of appropriate roles based on their own previous experiences and cultural values. So, in order to explore the contexts in which you teach, you will also need to understand what roles are and what the possibilities are. Materials also play a role in the teaching-learning enterprise. The roles played by these three players in the classroom are interdependent and are both work-related and interpersonal. For example, learners take quite different roles if they are imitating utterances the teacher makes and repeating them as a whole class than if they are working in groups to solve a problem. Roles have interpersonal attributes because teachers and learners bring with them to the classroom beliefs about and attitudes towards status and position, and all the participants have their own value systems and personalities. Some of the roles that teachers have traditionally adopted are as:

 

• transmitter of information (about language)

• manager of learning—both content and activities

• manager of classrooms—including discipline

• a subject matter expert

• model of language use

• a monitor of progress.

 

These roles have been questioned as being too narrowly focused on teacher control. Instead, many educators advocate for social constructivist and learner-centered approaches because these approaches lead to greater learner autonomy. Constructivism is a theoretical approach to education which is inquiry-based. Learner- centered approaches include those in which learners contribute to the development of learning goals and activities, and in which teaching methodology and activities are aligned to learners’ preferences. Learner autonomy refers to learners taking responsibility for their own learning, making decisions about content, pace of learning, modes of learning, and the extent of self-direction or teacher-direction. In such a view, the teacher is a facilitator or coach of student learning, providing opportunities to learners so they are motivated and empowered or, as researchers in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) have said, the teacher becomes the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage”

 

The role teachers adopt as evaluator of student learning plays out in actions in the language classroom, as well as in formal and informal assessments. As teachers and learners interact in the classroom, teachers provide feedback to learners. How teachers provide feedback can influence their learning. For example, teachers often, in taking the role of empowering learners and expecting them to become autonomous learners, relinquish the role of coach. Perhaps they do not want to discourage some learners and so provide generic feedback on their performance, feedback that learners are not able to act on. Or, teachers focus on their role as monitor of progress and accentuate the negative, rather than the positive, and so discourage learners. Other roles that teachers may adopt are: needs analyst, curriculum developer, materials developer, counselor, mentor, team member, researcher, and professional. 

 

 

 

©

 

University of Oxford - post gradual studies 2009 'English Language Teaching'

University of Maastricht 2012 ‘Methodological courses for Teachers of English’

University of Tilburg 2014 ‘Methodological courses for Teachers of English’

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