Cultivation of Cross-cultural competence in language teaching

秦韶红

Key words:  culture, language

As the global development of science and technology and economy, cross-cultural communication is no longer a new phenomena. It has already become an important part in life for people to communicate with others from different nations, regions and with different cultural background. As a multi culture exchange platform, China is in an urgent need of talents who are with cross-cultural communicative competence. To learn a language is not only to learn it as a tool to understand passively but also to communicative actively.  Therefore, language teaching is faced with new challenges. It is high time that we language teachers thought about how to cultivate students’ cross-cultural communicative competence.

When one communicates with others who have a different culture with new values and new expectations, different communication styles can create conflicts and confusions.  The strong feelings of discomfort, fear, or insecurity which a person may have when they enter another culture are known as culture shock.  When a person moves to live in a foreign country, they may have a period of culture shock until they become familiar with the new culture.  That means that one has to adjust to different ways of perceiving and acting in communication when he enters a new culture.  Society and language are mutually indispensable.  Although the faculty of language acquisition and language use is innate and inherited, every individual’s language is acquired by man as a member of society.  He is brought up in a society whose culture exerts considerable influence on him. His language is influenced and shaped by the culture of that society.  In a broad sense language is a symbolic representation of a people and it comprises their historical and cultural backgrounds as well as their approach to life and their ways of living and thinking.  A common view of culture is that of something learned, transmitted, passed communication, the participants always choose a kind of means of speaking according to a certain cultural model.  Their social model decides their communicative behaviour.  The social knowledge produces communicative interaction. 

   Language is the soul of the country and people who speak it.  If language is taught only as a tool, very little culture will be taught along with the language.  The command of the language is superficial.  Learners will not be able to sense the power and the essence of a language because language is culture.  When a person decides to learn a language, English, as an example, he or she is not merely absorbing the linguistics of the language.  What he or she is taking in includes all the preconceptions about the language.  Most languages come with some cultural associations attached.  By speaking the language, therefore, one automatically (to a greater or lesser extent) connects oneself with the culture of that language.  To speak a language well, one has to be able to think in that language, and thought is extremely powerful.  A person’s mind is in a sense the center of his identity, so if a person thinks in one language in order to speak it, one might say that he has almost taken on an identity of that language speaking country. In my viewpoints, the more one knows about the language, the more eager he will be to know about the culture, history and people of the country. Vice versa, one can learn the language better when one knows more about the culture.  His cross-cultural communicative competence will therefore be improved. 

Traditional language teaching in class is often limited to the understanding of the context, the structure of the sentences and the usage of the vocabulary.  That most of the time is spent on these aspects is partly due to the aim of teaching.  The grammar knowledge is going to be tested and the vocabulary is necessary in reading.  And both of them are closely related to the purpose of language learning, namely having a high score in the examination.  Sometimes teachers have tried to involve a bit culture into the classroom but usually are discouraged by the students because the teaching of culture is neglected by most of the students. Also, It is not regarded as an aspect of the evaluation of one’s teaching ability.  Therefore, teacher may lose his own interest and enthusiasm.

On the other hand, students may have two basic kinds of motivation (Gardner and Lambert 1972).  The first is integrative motivation, which refers to the desire of language learners to acquire the language while immersing themselves into the whole culture of the language, in order to “identify themselves with and become part of that society”(Brown 1994:154).  The second is instrumental motivation, which refers to the functional need for learners to acquire the language in order to serve some utilitarian purpose, such as securing a job, or a place at a university.  Such instrumentally motivated students are neither concerned with the culture from which their target language emerged, nor interested in developing any feelings of affinity with the native speakers of that language.  Generally speaking, most students study the foreign language with the second type of motivation. They do not see too much necessity in learning a language as a cultural instead of the sole tool in communication.  Or they are unable to spare more time to taste the culture aspect of the language they are learning.

Therefore, it is up to teachers to remember that language teaching is not only teaching the language.  They have to try to involve more culture learning in a language class so as to develop not only communicative, but also cultural competence.

The most traditional way that is widely adopted is to make the students know about the culture of the country whose language is taught, including information about its people, about their general attitudes and world views.  Very often, teachers introduce the different ways of living of people.  Students know about holidays, customs, dos and don’ts of its people. They get more familiar with the country and its people as they learn more about the language. Some relevant background knowledge is added so that students can understand the content better.  For example, the text Van Gogh is a story about the famous artist.  His emotion is strong and his passion for painting is great. His behavior couldn’t be understood but he was finally accepted by the world.  When this text is taught, the teacher can bring the students into a much wider art world. The many different painting styles can arouse the students interest in arts and the students then better understand the great painter and his contribution, thus making language learning vivid and meaningful.

Sometimes literature texts such as Annie’s Diary are found in the textbooks.  It is a very good way to learn culture since literature can never be separated from culture and language.   Literature is authentic material.  Except for the language in the material, literature encourages interaction. It is a source of information about the target culture.  Students should not miss the chance to touch bits of social, political and historical background of it. What’s more, literary texts are often rich, with many layers of meaning.  They can be effectively used for discussions and sharing feeling or opinions.  In the whole process, students involve themselves in the language learning and culture awareness.

In fact, understanding a foreign culture requires putting that culture in relation with one’s own.  So the teaching of foreign languages must be made relevant to social life, where people need to communicate with each other in order to set the stage for possible mutual understanding. As learners become more and more proficient in a second language and familiar with a second culture, language learners try to articulate their new experience within their old one, making it relevant to their own lives, one day this way, one day that way, creating their own popular culture. Hence an intercultural approach to the teaching of culture should include a reflection both on the target and on the native culture.  Accordingly, in class teachers will guide the students to know about the target culture, to understand the myth and reality of native culture and finally to develop a third perspective. In this way, students are able to take both an insider’s and an outsider’s view on native culture and target culture.  So the primary task in the development of cross-cultural competence should be not so much to fill one frame with different contents, but to make explicit the boundaries of the frame and try out a different one.

To better achieve the aims to bring culture into a classroom teachers should be encouraged to recognize the rupture points in the logic of the explanations brought forth by their students in order to bring cross-cultural aspects of communication to the fore. They themselves also should be encouraged to broaden their readings to include, besides literature, studies by social scientists, ethnographers, and sociolinguists on both their society and the societies that speak the language they are teaching in order to cross disciplinary boundaries.

Bibliography

Claire Kramsch.1993.Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press

Guy Cook, Barbara Seidlhofer. 1995. Principles & Practice in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press

Literature can expand student awareness. Onestop Magazine

Gardner, Robert C., and Wallace Lambert. 1972 Attitudes and Motivation in Second Language Learning. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House