Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching (with Jonathan Newton)

Professor Jonathan Newton joins me to discuss intercultural language teaching. What is it and what’s the best way of teaching it?

Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute podcast everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn and on today's episode we're going to be talking about teaching intercultural communication. I have Jonathan Newton from the University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Jonathan has worked in language teaching and teacher education for more than 30 years. He's published lots of books and articles including English teaching and intercultural learning in Asia. So in the interview you'll hear me ask Jonathan about what culture is, like what should we be teaching when we're teaching culture, how we can make culture a topic of the class, how we can get students to explore the cultural side of how we communicate, and finally how to avoid some of the pitfalls of teaching culture like stereotyping.

Enjoy the episode! Hi Jonathan, welcome to the podcast. To begin with, what is culture? Often when I see culture being taught in language classes it's things like what food people eat or what music people listen to or what festivals get celebrated in different parts of the world. But I think when you're talking about intercultural language teaching you're really talking about a different kind of culture from that.

Yeah, that's a good question. It's a tough one too because I think the word culture must be one of the most contested words in academia. You know, what is culture? It's a tough one.

It's so many things, it's so many visible things, but so much of who we are culturally, our identity is subliminal. It's not something we've consciously adopted but it's just part of the the water we've been swimming in since we were born, you know. So I think it's quite it's quite hard to stand apart and answer what it is and you know there are lots of undercurrents of beliefs that we have that come out of our cultural milieu that we haven't deliberately chosen and partly intercultural language learning is helping learners to step apart and see those undercurrents and sort of become aware of them and become aware of how they influence our behavior and how they influence the way we interpret other people's behavior, especially communicative behavior, right, because you know we have such different norms across culture for how to do communication in so many ways.

So coming back to your question and the traditional way of dealing with culture, sort of alluding to the examples you gave, was what the 4Fs approach, which is food festivals, what are the folk dances and famous people or fashion or something, it's a classic. Certainly in the foreign language classroom and in western context, you know, if learning French, you learn about the Eiffel Tower and croissant and whatever it might be, but in the context of intercultural language teaching, we're really trying to move away from learning facts about a culture or learning norms about how they do things in China or France. That's part of it, but it's only a small part.

In the context of communicative language teaching, I think there are three ways we can see culture being present in ways that allow for intercultural learning. One is in the topics we talk about, so we can choose topics that have cultural content. It might be family meal times or it might be holidays, you know, or it might be the school culture and that's fine, but I think in the communicative language classroom, we can also focus on the cultural dimensions of how we communicate.

Small talk, for example, is such a rich area to explore what kind of small talk is common in your context or in the way you communicate in your first language compared to another language. And I think the third dimension of culture we can explore, so I've talked about, you know, the topics we talk about, the cultural aspects of language, but I think we can also reflect on how we manage ourselves in communication from a cultural perspective. Eye contact, body movement, perhaps the way we interject or interrupt or don't.

So all those sort of things are culturally normified and so there's quite a bit to explore there. Great, so let's explore that idea of the topics that we talk about in class and how we can relate those to culture. You've said that it can be useful to get students to start off by thinking about their own culture from the perspective of an outsider.

Can you tell us a bit more about that? How can teachers do that and why is that maybe more effective than looking at other cultures and things like festivals and sports and foods and things like that? Michael Byram, who is one of the most, if not the most, well-known scholar in the cultural language learning and teaching, he makes the point that our job is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Now that's very different from an English teacher teaching their kids about American culture. This is how they do things in America.

All you're doing there is making the unfamiliar even stranger in a sense. You know, you've got that danger, you're kind of leading to stereotypes and I think there's a fundamental problem about the starting point being looking outwards at another culture because it implies an invisible position which you're not made aware of. So you're looking out and judging the other culture without being aware that you're judging it from a relativistic subjective position and that's the basis for prejudice and stereotyping.

And so one way to get around that is to make the learner's own cultural world the starting point. So you're learning English but in an English classroom reflecting on who am I as a Chinese learner of English? What is it about my cultural world which is interesting or might be unusual to somebody visiting from another country? There's a really nice example in my book I talk about from the Cambodian textbook put together by the Nippon Foundation where the kids have to listen to this Japanese girl Akiko talking about her experience of coming to a Cambodian home and enjoying a Cambodian meal in the home. So these are Cambodian learners and the activity begins with the question if Akiko comes to your home what would you cook her and what do you think you know she would think about your food and your eating arrangement.

So now there's a tangible example of not only are we not learning about English culture or American culture but it's a Japanese girl so you've got a third cultural reference point coming to our culture and I'm having to reflect on who I am and how other people see me culturally. So I think it's a nice example of how we can start by reflecting on self. There's a really nice quote from Irving and Gall anthropologists there's no gaze from nowhere I'll say it again there's no gaze from nowhere no gaze that is not position and it's helping learners understand their positionality which I think is a way in our globalizing world to kind of step away from moving straight to judgment.

So that was the idea of making culture a topic in the classroom. Next I wanted to ask you about the cultural side of how we communicate. So how can teachers add an intercultural dimension to tasks and activities maybe that they're already doing in the classroom.

So I wrote a book with Nikki Riddiford on communication in the workplace for professional migrants to New Zealand having to adjust to the workplace here and I'll just draw on examples from that book. So what we would do and this is for migrants who are going to move into you know positions as lawyers or doctors or accountants and so forth. So we've got a database here of authentic recordings from the workplace and many workplaces in New Zealand.

We would take these examples and we would build a lesson around them. So the lesson might start with a scenario. So you're the manager of a team and you've got to get a report ready by tonight and you're running out of time and you need your secretary to stay late to finish the report.

Work together and role play the interaction and then they do that and then they reflect on how they manage this because it's a delicate piece of interaction and then they compared it to the authentic one. Now in the authentic role play the manager said something like look I was wondering if you wouldn't mind would it be possible for you to stay a little bit later tonight because I really have to get this report in. So so much hedging and softening but for a lot of these migrants who came from sort of quite hierarchical societies their role play was I need you to stay late tonight because I've got this work that needs to be done.

Not much more than that and that for them was quite appropriate because you're the boss that's what you do. Now the process of sort of trying it out experiencing it yourself and then comparing revealed some interesting cultural differences. So what's the key there? It's getting learners to try things out to experience the language or to listen to dialogues or to read dialogues and to notice things that they think are a bit unusual.

Another one of my Vietnamese students Thao did a really great PhD in which learners they had a listening textbook and it's basically a listening class and she would look at the scenario for the dialogue and in a similar way she would get the learners to role play the scenario first in Vietnamese or in English it didn't matter and then to do the listening activities and now compare what was different and you see that point of comparison gives learners a reference point culturally for reflecting on what preconceptions did they have which were not realised in the dialogue. I've got to say I really like that idea of getting students to compare what they said in that little role play to what was in the original materials. I think that's very similar to what we get students to do in task-based learning and I love there that you can take that process of do the task, think about the language you used and then compare that to this example from the materials and just change it slightly so that instead of the focus only being on the language used the focus is on the culture and the language at the same time.

The key there is you're giving learners the opportunity to make decisions that are culturally embedded even if they don't realise it you know that is making decisions about how to navigate this encounter, how to do small talk, how to greet, how to negotiate a difficult situation, whatever it might be and then you've got another point of reference where you've got albeit a made-up dialogue you know from a so-called Western context. So I think a lot of these examples that we've been talking about so far have been for higher level students. I wanted to ask you what can teachers do for lower level students or for younger children? What can teachers do with beginners or children to introduce culture? I think this is a kind of an example that you might consider role-playing if you like your classroom in Japan or China being a classroom in a Western context.

How would we interact differently? Well let's say you're in a particularly sort of progressive school in New Zealand and all the kids call the teacher by the first name. Let's try that out today. Now that's going to feel outrageously awkward but you know that is experiencing firsthand a different cultural way of using language and I think the interesting thing there is that everything we do every time we speak we are constructing a way of being which is either sort of challenging the cultural norms or reaffirming them and strengthening them.

If you're a teacher in Malaysia and as you typically do you walk into your class and the class will stand up and you say good morning class and the whole class in unison says good morning teacher and then you walk up and down the aisles and you say is the classroom tidy today? Everybody says yes teacher, thank you, sit down. Now you know you've just strengthened some cultural norms but you could come in there and you could do something really interesting. You could come in and you could say hey class how you doing today? You've done something cultural there haven't you because you've actually sort of challenged hierarchy and formality in just the way you greet the class.

Finally Jonathan I wanted to ask you about the potential dangers of talking about culture in the classroom. I found that sometimes talking about culture can go badly wrong and can end up leading to more stereotyping rather than less. So what are some of your principles or suggestions for getting students to engage with culture to make sure that that doesn't happen? Yeah Jo Orange did a PhD at the University of Otago where she looked at this in German foreign language classes and she got the kids to come up with three stereotypes about Germans.

So here we're saying hey you do it you know if you've got stereotypes let's get them out there. Okay and so by recollection it was things like German or you can guess you know Germans are very direct. One of them was Germans like being naked.

Well there you go. Okay so now she said these are your hypotheses about what it is to be German. Now we're going to get you to interview a German person and you're going to talk to that person about these stereotypes you know if this person agreed or disagreed.

The other thing she did is said now that you've got your three stereotypes now I want you to imagine somebody telling you that those are their stereotypes of you and your culture. In other words huh as a New Zealander you are very direct and you like being naked and how does that feel you know and how would you react to that. So you kind of reverse the process you experience those stereotypes being labeled on you.

The point is and Fred Durbin said that one doesn't meet cultures one meets individuals and so a principle of intercultural language teaching is you work at the individual level. Joanne Arange's work kind of dealing with generalizations to start with but nevertheless it did come down to focusing on an individual as well and the principle there is that you experience culture and you explore the experience someone else's experience of culture as well. Now every learner in China doesn't have a partner in America or New Zealand or Australia wherever to talk to right but you can do that through little case studies and textbooks or things you can find online little recordings.

So I think getting down to the level of the individual is really important and moving away from grossly just normalizing a whole culture. One more time everyone that was Jonathan Newton. For more from Jonathan click on the link in the show notes.

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