Cultural Awareness in the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

This article discusses the development of the role that culture plays in foreign language teaching and learning, mainly in Europe. Over the past 15–20 years, the emphasis on cultural competence and awareness has increased. This heightened focus is largely the result of work instigated by the Council of Europe and the influence on foreign language teaching of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001). Despite the vast influence of the Framework, different traditions related to cultural awareness in European language teaching can still be seen: on the one hand, the originally German concept of Bildung as an overall aim of education, on the other, a tradition that focuses more on skills and competences. The former reflects a philosophical view of cultural relationships in which the roles of Self and Other take centre stage. The latter is based on a more instrumental and utilitarian view of foreign language learning with an emphasis on skills. In most European countries, national curricula reflect both these traditions, often with the former as a general aim for all subjects. Recently also a third direction can be distinguished: the development of crosscultural didactics (Krumm and Muller-Jacquier, 2002). Culture is a complex concept and different approaches to studying culture have influenced language teaching. Risager (2003, p. 84) distinguishes between three main categories of the concept: the individual, the collective and the aesthetic, all of them relevant to foreign language teaching. Recent research on culture in this context has concentrated on anthropological approaches because these are primarily concerned with the collective and because of their focus on ‘the Other’ (p. 89). In foreign language teaching it is, however, important to include the individual aspect. According to the phenomenologist Peter Berger, culture ‘is at base an all-embracing socially constructed world of subjectively and inter-subjectively experienced meanings. Culture must be constructed and reconstructed as a continuous process’ (Berger in Wuthnow, Hunter, Bergesen and Kurzweil, 1984, p. 25). Here culture