Teaching English in Korea - ESL blog

Teaching culture in an EFL class

I recently wrote about cultural misundersatnding & teaching EFL. Today I continue along similar lines.

Hall (2002) writes that people learn how to perform social tasks, which are part of daily living through “time and experience in our activities with the more experienced members” (p.49). Now part of performing a social task is using language, and language teachers are always trying to help learners develop linguistic resources. Less clear, however, is how to help learners develop cultural knowledge.

Perhaps some people feel that the only way to learn culture is through interacting with “experienced members” of a culture. However, it seems that there must be something we can do in the classroom to help learners with the cultural knowledge they need to fully understand the language they are learning in class.

Then with English there is the question of what culture to teach. Many people of the world learn English as a non-native language. My EFL students in Korea may be learning English to interact with Americans, or Japanese people, both, or neither. Must English learners know sociocultural norms from every culture? This is probably impossible, although I imagine that it would be very fun to try. I have been considering proposing a new course at my university, in which students would learn English through studying other cultures. It would be a CBI course with cultural content.

Another possibility is to take a normal conversation course and bring up the subject of cultural differences. As I write in my essay for my sociolinguistics class, Romaine (2000) says:

Some English-speaking communities are more likely to give and accept compliments than others. Either of these differences could cause an uncomfortable situation, because, as Nishida (1999) points out, situations that don’t make sense to a person’s PSI schema lead to stress. (Trotta, 2004)

This reminds me of a problem I often have: my students telling me how handsome I am. In an American classroom, it is pretty rare for college students to tell the professor how attractive s/he is. It happens to me in Korea all the time. Perhaps a way to reduce my own stress and help students realize that having the language to say something doesn’t make it an appropriate thing to say would be to discuss the differences between how Korean teachers and Western teachers are treated. I honestly don’t know if Korean teachers receive compliments about their physical appearance. Do learners do it because it is acceptable in their culture? Or do they do it because they think it is acceptable in my culture?

Hall, J.K. (2002). Teaching and Researching Language and Culture. London:
Longman.

Nishida, H. (1999). A cognitive approach to intercultural communication based on schema theory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 23 (5), 753-777.

Romaine, S. (2000). Language in Society (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Posted by James Trotta at June 15, 2004 10:05 AM