Cultural Awareness

ncerned, traditional textbooks have contained a series of texts, often created by the authors, about the foreign culture, followed by reproduction exercises with the aim of learning and accepting facts. The knowledge taught in such a context has, in some countries, been termed 'background' or 'civilization' in English, 'Landeskunde' in German. The word 'background' is in itself quite revealing if we analyse what view of culture is inherent in this type of teaching. It implies forming the background to something else, namely language, which is in the 'foreground', and, therefore, must be regarded as more important. This view creates a dividing line between culture and language, seeing them as separate entities rather than two aspects of the same. However important the facts in themselves may be, the language in which they are presented, and what the learners are supposed to do with the facts, are a crucial means of developing cultural awareness. Textbooks for primary and lower secondary school have dealt with b) through dialogues and patterns of ritual speech acts of what to say in specific situations followed by, for instance, role play exercises of similar situations. This methodology in its extreme form resulted in coursebooks which were almost devoid of content. If our aim is to give learners an opportunity to develop cultural awareness, neither a) nor b) is sufficient. Both are important, yet there is something missing. In order to find out what this is, I believe it is necessary to take a closer look at what we today conceive of as 'culture'. Whose culture? If we look at the term historically, culture was seen purely as the classical cultural heritage up to the Early Renaissance. During the Romantic period 'national culture and identity' and 'the way people lived' were included in an understanding of the term. Today we can talk about at least two types of culture, 'culture of the elite' and 'culture of the people', or 'elitist' culture and 'common' culture, 'common' here understood as the everyday lives of ordinary people. Foreign language teaching in primary and lower secondary education has in recent years focused primarily on the latter. During the 20th century it has become possible to envisage a separation between culture and the way we live, while as before the two were not only interrelated, but also interdependent. People were born into a culture and stayed there. But for the first time, historically, the 20th century regards identity as something we can create for ourselves; we have, in fact, a choice of culture. Young people are not only aware of this, but also frequent users of the opportunity to choose between different cultures or subcultures. Culture can be seen as the identity common to a society or a group of people within that society, but it is also the way members of the society regard this common identity. If we only regard culture as something that 'can be found out there', e.g. paintings, football, literature, food, etc., we will tend to view different cultures or subcultures as objects from a distance. But culture is more than artefacts that 'can be found out there', it is also the glasses through which we perceive the world around us and the language we use to express the culture of which we are an integral part. We are influenced by the culture(s) we are socialized into, and simultaneously we influence that culture. This is a dialectic process, and culture must be seen as a dynamic force in continuous flux, not a static entity. The process does not only take place within our own culture; a similar process constitutes the encounter with a foreign culture. Language as culture Language or text is probably the most influential factor in the dynamic interrelationship between cultures. If culture is not only what we see, but also the way we see it and the language we use to express it, culture cannot merely be regarded as a body of knowledge which can be transmitted to the