Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Thinking Allowed
1.
Introduction
Culture has long been part of second language (L2) teaching and learning whether through a focus on the literature written in the chosen target language or an interest in the country, people and traditions associated with the language. However, with the socio-cultural turn in applied linguistics, the last few decades have seen an accompanying rise in interest in the cultural dimension to language teaching and learning exemplified in such seminal writings as Kramsch (1993, 1998) and particularly Byram's (1997) intercultural communicative competence framework. Nonetheless, the influence these and other theoretical and empirical studies have had on teaching practice at the 'chalk-face' is still debatable. In this article I will examine the extent to which research findings have been applied, where this has been done well, where it has not, and where the findings have been over-applied. Such an evaluation will necessarily be subjective, and I will draw on my own experiences of teaching masters level courses in the UK to language teachers from around the world, as well as my experiences of and continued interest in English language teaching (ELT) in Thailand. At the same time though, I will relate these experiences to what we currently understand through research about the role of cultural and intercultural awareness in L2 use and learning. Given my experiences of ELT, the discussion will mainly focus on English language teaching; however, many of the issues will be relevant to teaching other languages.
1.2
Cultural and intercultural awareness
The term 'cultural awareness' (CA) has been used by a number of writers in relation to language teaching but its best known formulation is Byram's (1997: 63-64) critical cultural awareness, which forms the core of intercultural communicative competence (ICC). ICC is an attempt to expand the view of communicative competence used in language teaching (i.e. Canale & Swain 1980) to explicitly recognise the intercultural use to which L2s are put and the range of skills, knowledge and attitudes associated with this. In ICC, rather than examining the competence needed for successful 'native speaker' communication, the focus is on communication between participants with different linguaculture backgrounds. Critical cultural awareness is crucial to ICC in providing the foundation for evaluating one's own and other's...