INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BASIC AND APPLIED SCIENCE

Insan Akademika Publications

P-ISSN: 2301-4458 E-ISSN: 2301-8038 Vol. 01, No. 01 July 2012

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Cultural Mirrors: Materials and Methods in English as a Foreign Language

Dian Ekawati1 and Fakry Hamdani2
Faculty of Education and Teacher Training State Islamic University of Sunan Gunung Djati, Bandung Jl. A. H. Nasution No. 105, Bandung-INDONESIA dian_ekawati_a@yahoo.co.id Faculty of Education and Teacher Training State Islamic University of Sunan Gunung Djati, Bandung Jl. A. H. Nasution No. 105, Bandung-INDONESIA fakry80@gmail.com
2 1

Key Words
Culture, Material, EFL

Abstract
This study tries to review the role of culture in the textbooks and methods used in the classroom. With the documentation and observation as the center of data, the study also tries to arise students awareness of the target culture. The study found that some EFL (English as a Foreign Language) textbooks and EFL methods did not reflect not only the target culture, but also source culture and international culture. Thus, the students and teacher could experience the cultural mismatch. However, the cultural mismatch aroused from different culture of learning between teacher and students or between students and textbooks can be handled by ethnographic stance and explicit teaching
2012 Insan Akademika All Rights Reserved

Background

It is obvious that the teaching of English should consider both language and its culture. Brown (1994) states that whenever we teach a language we also teach a complex system of cultural customs, values, and ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Parallel to Brown, Brooks in Valdes (1986) supports that assumption by saying that the teacher must relate language to culture if a coordinate system is to result from the learners efforts. Here, the culture of the language plays an important role in educational language excellence. In addition, according to Cahyana in Pikiran Rakyat (2001), textbook will directly and indirectly lead to the quality of educational system. However, there cannot be faithful representation of the culture in the Englishlanguage teaching materials or textbooks that the EFL teachers are teaching. The textbooks, generally, only present the international uses of the language but they, actually, should include the aspects of the target culture or in other words the elements of the culture. Therefore, in this chapter, we will analyze some textbooks that figure culture of the English language, highlight the difference between cultural content and cultural medium that we call it culture of learning, and evaluate the textbooks for cultural elements. The culture embedded in the textbooks cannot be separated from the culture of learning because the medium for learning used in the classroom is a part of culture of learning. Its culture of learning is an indicator of knowing the learning process in the classroom that will lead to possible misunderstanding or mismatch
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Ekawati and Hamdani

between culture in the textbooks and culture of learning that used by teachers or students to acquire the knowledge, skills, or attitudes about the target culture. It is assumed that learning foreign language is only mastering the object of academic study whereas it is for learning a means of communication. Thus, it is recognized that language learning and learning about target cultures cannot be separated (Valdes, 1986; Robinson, 1988; Byram, 1989; Harrison, 1990; Kramsch, 1993a). It is very important to include culture in the textbooks in order to arise students awareness of the target culture. EFL method also reflects culture of learning. Thats why the writer is interested in presenting the cultural mirrors in the textbooks and methods used in the classroom.

Language Teaching and Intercultural Competence

As stated above, language learning and learning about target culture cannot be separated. Byram in Hinkell (1999) shares that foreign language teaching show three broad aims which should be integrated in the process of teaching and learning of foreign language. The aims are: the development of communicative competence for use in situations the learner might expect to encounter; the development of awareness of the nature of language and language learning; the development of insight into the foreign culture and positive attitudes toward foreign people. Culture, in fact, consists of various elements. Some experts define culture in many ways. Culture in broad sense, according to Valette in Valdes (1986), has two major components. One is anthropological or sociological culture: the attitudes, customs, and daily activities of the people, their ways of thinking, their values, and their frames of reference. The other component of culture is the history of civilization. Traditionally representing the culture element in foreign language teaching, it includes geography, history, and achievement in sciences, social sciences, and the arts. This second component forms the framework for the first: it represents the heritage of a people and as such must be appreciated by the students who wish to understand the new target culture. In addition, some language teacher use the terms refer to cultural products (e.g. literary works or works of art) and background information (e.g. facts about the history or geography of countries). Moerman in Hinkel (1999) defines culture as a set perhaps a system of principles of interpretation, together with the products of that system. Thus, culture, as a whole, can be seen as the framework of assumptions, ideas, and beliefs that are used to interpret other peoples action, words, and patterns of thinking. However, it is very important for language learner to know the different cultural frameworks, either their own or those of others so that with their knowledge of different culture, the language learners can adapt themselves in learning the language as well as the culture of it. Hinkel (1999) analyses that communicative competence consisting of grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competences seems insufficient in relation to the learning. He believes that communicative competence is still too broad while the need of intercultural competence is very urgent here. Intercultural competence defined as the ability of person to behave adequately in a flexible manner when confronted with, actions, attitudes, and expectations of representatives of foreign culture (Meyer, 1991: 137). The learners actually can be aware of this from various media such as TV, multimedia, newspaper etc. Sooner or later, they encounter the member of other cultural groups. In line with this point of view, one would expect the EFL or ESL textbooks reflects a range of cultural contexts and include intercultural elements either in curriculum design or evaluation. Therefore, it is expected that cultural materials on text book will support the students awareness of intercultural issues that enable them to communicate in various communicative context with an appropriate and effective manner.

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Insan Akademika Publications

Ekawati and Hamdani

International Journal of Basic and Applied Science, Vol 01, No. 01, July 2012, pp. 53-59

Evaluating Textbooks for Cultural Elements Recently, the role of textbooks has extended as follows. 1. a teacher: the textbooks contains the materials that instructs the students about the English speaking cultures. 2. a map: the textbooks give the overview of a structured program. 3. a resource: the textbooks give a set of materials and activities from which the most useful items will be chosen. 4. a trainer: the textbooks guide the an inexperienced teacher and untrained teacher accomplishes step-by step instruction. 5. an authority: the textbooks are valid and written by the expert and carry the authorization of important publishers or minister of education. 6. a de-skiller: the textbook gives the interpretation, critical approach to use the materials as the teacher isnt trained to do. 7. an ideology: the textbooks reflect a worldview or cultural system, a social construction that maybe imposed on teachers and students and construct their perspective of a culture. Also, English textbooks may function as a form of cultural politics. More specifically, Richard (1993) in Hinkell (1999) states, I see textbooks as sourcebooks rather than coursebooks. I see their role as facilitating teaching, rather than restricting it. However in order to be able to serve as sources for creative teaching, teachers need to develop skills in evaluating and adapting published materials. Evaluating the textbooks, now, is a normal part in EFL or ESL teacher training (Hinkel, 1999). The usual way to do this is by getting the teacher to examine textbooks based on the evaluative checklists

Textbook Evaluation Checklists Since there are some textbooks do not include culture in their publications, it is useful for us to know in what ways the materials involve learners values, attitudes, and feelings. Cunningsworths list (1984) tries to see the cultural content of the textbooks from cultural skill as well as cultural knowledge perspectives. It is intended to check whether a cultural setting is acceptable to learners, whether culture is only for the linguistic materials, and whether the cultural contexts help learners in perceiving and categorizing social situations they may find themselves in. Cunningsworth encourages teachers to ask whether the social and cultural contexts are interpretable by students because he argues that language textbooks are bound to express some social and cultural values. Supporting the former, Byrams list specifies on cultural content. He examines evaluating the treatment of cultural content in language textbooks. Meanwhile, Risager (1991) used the same criteria to examine elementary EFL textbooks used in Scandinavia. She found that in the social and geographic definition of textbook characters, the people featured are predominantly middle-class, young people, isolated individuals who are often tourists or visitors to urban centres. They engage in trivial linguistic interaction in mainly leisure activities or consumer situations. They reveal few feeling or opinions and never engage in social, moral, or philosophical problems. The table below will show the Byrams list:

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Criteria for textbook evaluation

Focus on cultural content Social identity and social groups (social class, regional identity, ethnic minorities) Social interaction (differing levels of formality; as outsider and insider) Belief and behaviour (moral, religious beliefs; daily routine) Social and political Institution (state institution, health care, law and order, social security)

Figure 1. Criteria for Text Book Evaluation

Evaluating Treatment of Cultural Content in Textbooks

Giving factually accurate and up-to-date information Avoiding (relativizing) stereotypes by raising awareness Presenting realistic pictures Being free from (questioning) ideological tendencies Presenting phenomena in context rather than an isolated facts Explicitly relating historical material to contemporary society

Figure 2. Evaluating treatment of cultural content of textbooks

Textbooks Based on Source Cultures There are EFL textbooks produced at a national level for particular countries mirror the source culture (rather than target culture) so that the source and target culture are identical. For example, a textbooks for Venezuela and Turkey. The textbooks have a text describing the countrys chief geographic of Venezuela or the food and history of Turkish. The implication is that students learn English to talk to the visitors who come to the country. They may talk to the visitor by using their own culture; they dont become aware of their own cultural identity. However, people should have intercultural communication. Intercultural communication is defined as an effective identity negotiation process in novel communication episodes, or demonstrated ability to negotiate mutual meanings, rules, and positive outcomes. Now, why do people use source culture? The reason is that it can help students their own cultural identity, deprives learners that identity. Then the result is students cannot engage in intercultural negotiation with a text portraying another culture, unable to engage in dialog with the text to identify and confirm their own cultural identity, or ascertain the differences and similarities with another culture By having this type of communication it is expected that they will cope with the situation and the teacher who has the role as mediator, mediates the textbook in classroom interaction, indicating which aspects the source culture would be interesting or problematic for TL speaker. But it demands intercultural knowledge, skills, and awareness of teacher.

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Insan Akademika Publications

Ekawati and Hamdani

International Journal of Basic and Applied Science, Vol 01, No. 01, July 2012, pp. 53-59

Textbooks Based on Target Culture There are large number of books focus on target culturesocial, commercial values in order to promote awareness of gender, environmental issues etc. For example, elementary school textbooks which are marketed worldwide portrayed a multicultural nature of American societyhusband as being responsible for child care and house work, while their wives are breadwinners. Another example is in social issue such as child abuse, students are asked to give opinions and comments. From this, we divide the texts into two: closed-text and open-text. Closed-text provides unproblematic world that confirms or reinforces learners views and beliefs. While open-text invites possible interpretation, elaborations, and learners responds such as slavery issues in America.

Textbook Aimed at International Target Culture This kind of textbooks include a wide variety of cultures set in English speaking countries or in a country where English not a first and second language but used as international language. International target culture means that English is used in international situation by the speaker who do not speak as first language, For example Belgian teacher taught Chinese people and they learn it in order to have the ability to talk to Germany and Italian engineering. This book offers interesting culture mirror, the learning of culture and the development of intercultural skills depend in large part on how the textbooks are used in the classroom, the quality of interaction between students, texts, and teachers.

Culture Learning as Dialogue Culture learning through textbook is a process of dialogue in which students negotiate the meaning and identity with the author of the textbook and its cultural content. Here, the role of teacher is as mediator and manager of the way students see the culture mirror in the textbooks and also as a ambassador of culture. Then, a three party-dialogue with the culture content comes when the textbook is used in classroom interaction. The result shows that source cultures dominate the interaction, so that culture content becomes filtered or distorted by the participants approach to interaction with the text.

The Implication for Language Teaching Textbook with different approach of learning seems to be difficult if the teacher and learners still do not have cultural awareness. For example, Chinese students expect western teacher to explain the textbooks while they learn it with attentive listening because the teacher is regarded as an authority and provider of knowledge while western teacher expects Chinese students to be active, hard working, well-motivated etc. Then, they have negative view of each others culture. This cultural mismatch can be avoided by teaching culture in the classroom. Teaching culture is conducted through: textbooks have cultural content. teacher and student should have ethnographic stance toward cultural content and methodology to develop cultural awareness: being aware of members of another cultural groups: their behaviour, expectation, perspectives and values. more textbooks which include explicit intercultural elements. teacher help students to understand the culture of their own and target culture, how to learn culture. explicit teaching, that is by asking student how target culture member interpret the expression, give situation and let them choose to give cultural consequences they have chosen. By paying attention and doing those points, the cultural mismatch could be avoided or reduced so that successful learning can be reached.

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Similar Research Findings Fearey and Lalor in English Language and Culture in Soviet Textbooks, as cited in (Harrison, 1990) found ideology is set out all levels of education including the textbooks. The pursuance of political goals education in both Soviet and English classroom is strongly influencing the presentation of subject matter. The product is technically excellent, even outstanding but linguistic success frequently prevents the students from realising how much the substance and reality of the culture is absent from his awareness, especially modern idiom terms. The tragedy is that their knowledge, cannot be backed by depth of cultural understanding. Curtain and Pesola in Savignon (1988) proposed some criteria for evaluating textbooks and other printed materials when they examined materials used in Spanish, German, English-speaking classrooms. They investigated whether culture is integrated into the program materials or not, whether the emphasis of the program is on experiencing culture rather than on learning that culture, whether culture is presented from global perspective rather than focussing on a single country, region, or ethnic group, whether the situations and language presented are culturally authentic, or whether the materials promote an appreciation of the value and richness of cultural diversity or not. They found that materials (1) did not reflect the insight of communication and language acquisition, (2) are not completely transferable to elementary school foreign language classroom, (3) developed for the children of guest workers in Germany or the children of German-speaking families living abroad are often too advanced and proceed too rapidly when they used with American speakers of English. Those findings show that there are still a lot of textbooks that do not have cultural content and result from mismatch between the learners and the textbooks especially their cultural understanding.

Conclusion

EFL textbooks reflect not only the target culture, but also source culture and international culture. EFL methods or cultures of learning also reflect culture. It is very crucial to learn culture because without it the students and teacher could experience the cultural mismatch. However, the cultural mismatch aroused from different culture of learning between teacher and students or between students and textbooks can be handled by ethnographic stance and explicit teaching. Regarding to this kind of condition, it is very urgent to teach culture in the classroom especially when we teach foreign language (and also second language). Bear in your mind that when we teach culture, do not teach the students culture explicitly but implicitly so that students will infer the culture by themselves and there is not time-consuming. By doing so, we hope then, the cultural mismatch will be avoided either by students or by the teachers.

References
Brown, H. D.. (1994). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Prentice Hall Regents, New Jersey. Cahyana, H. G. (2001). Reposisi Textbook Pendidikan Tinggi. Pikiran Rakyat. February, 24. Granesia, Bandung. Hinkel, E. (1999). Culture in Language Teaching and Learning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Savignon, J. S. (1988). Languages and Children; Making the Match. Company, New York. Addison-Wesley Publishing

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Valdes, M. (1986). Culture Bound: Bridging the Cultural Gap in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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