1. English 343: Culture
and its complexities
WEEK 2
Recent approaches to culture
Learning, interaction and culture

2. Agenda
• Your Voices
• Overview of key concepts and theories
• Recent approaches to culture (Moran, Kumar,
Wintergerst)
• Discussion Facilitation by Amy, Kelly and Kaitlyn
Culture and its complexities (Kumar Ch. 2 & Interaction
and culture in language teaching (Hinkel 1 and 2).
• Group Discussion: Teaching culture. Approaches to
intercultural communication (Wintergerst, A. &McVeigh,
)

3. Important terms and concepts
Hinkel Kumar
CHAPTER 2 AND 3 CHPATER 2
• Speech events • Habitus
• Conversational • Cultural capital
Implicature
• Cooperative Principle • Otherization/cultural
otherization
• Inner speech
• The principle of
• Habitus linguistic relativity
• Interaction and culture
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

4. Your voices on
culture…
Reflections, reactions, reappropriations, and more….

5. Shawn says…
• Ever since studying abroad, I've started to realize that culture
was more than what I see, feel, hear, etc. It finally hit me when
something incredible happened one time while I was studying
abroad in Taiwan. This was how the story went…
• This is story is one of the many I know that has made me think
about culture differences. I started to think about the "hidden"
culture. The culture that isn't easily seen or noticed. From
Wintergerst and McVeigh's book and Patrick Moran's Teaching
Culture, I learned about culture being like an iceberg. There is a
part that is seen (above water) and another part that isn't
seen, but is there (below the surface of the water). My "hidden"
culture is actually true!!

6. Victoria says…
• I believe that, as nearly all our authors studied thus far, students
should discuss the idea of culture as an iceberg and detail what
culture means to them. In this way, in reading their course texts,
they can take all they read with the proverbial grain of salt;
hopefully understanding that the small boxes shoved into textbook
margins or short online videos featuring the same cast of
characters at the end of each chapter is NOT representative of an
entire people, its generations, its history, and even its present!
• There is so much more to a people than what can be demonstrated
in reading a textbook and in 50 minutes of instruction... or even in
100 hours of instruction. Language instruction is an opportunity
to get a glimpse at the tip of an iceberg that is the studied
language. Language study opens the door so that each student
might pass through and learn firsthand what the global perspective
has in store on his/her adventure through Wonderland. Discussion
of cultural 'norms' is helpful to students in understanding actions
or ways of speaking which they might otherwise view (through
ATTRIBUTION) as bizarre or offensive.

7. Tara says…
• One concern Hinkel brings up is that foreign language can rarely be
learned or taught without addressing the culture of the community in
which it is used. Unfortunately though, in many language classrooms
culture is frequently reduced to foods, fairs, folklore, and statistical
facts. Instead of teaching these surface level parts of culture, it is
important to link the teaching of language to culture as a whole. Often
times this is a difficult task and teachers are not trained in pedagogy
courses successful ways of teaching culture and language together.
Another concern is that even the nonnative speakers who have had
many years of experience with the second culture may have to “find
their own place at the intersection of their natal target cultures” (6).
Also, although it may be possible to develop an intellectual
understanding and tolerance of other cultures, it may not be as easy for
people to become cognitively like members of other cultures. For
example, it may be difficult for adults to see the world through
culturally different eyes. When teaching Spanish I am challenged by
these concerns because I have spent a very small amount of time in
countries where the Spanish language is spoken; therefore, I have not
developed my own identity within the target language culture and find
it difficult to teach something I am not completely a part of.

8. Sarah says…
Second culture acquisition has been investigated from
social, attitudinal, and cognitive standpoints. Adults
are indeed capable of restructuring the culture to some
extent but with the right motivation and context.
Culture is better labeled as a verb, not a noun, because
it is a dynamic process of transforming order in society
and identifying formation. It is a prism through which
we view life.

9. Victoria says…
• In class last week, when I related culture to water, you (Dr
Lisya Seloni) asked me whether or not the water held the shape
of its container even once removed. Thinking on this, and on
this week's reading, I would say yes, but only to an extent. We
are like ice cubes, forming since birth within a certain shapely
confine: some round, some square, some heart or seahorse-
shaped. Once we are removed from our specific local cultures,
like the ice cube removed from the freezer tray, we melt over
time. We may then re-form in a similar, but never quite the
same shape, or we may take a new perspective-shape
completely. However, we are still water and will always carry
with us the minerals of our source (or in the case of my freezer
here, little pieces of broccoli or spinach that we keep frozen for
later use and which somehow always finds its way into the
cubes).

10. Susana says…
• When I go visit family in Mexico I am shocked to hear that my
cousins who speak only Spanish are listening music in English that
is popular here in the United States. Also, the way they dress is
also Americanized. They watch tv shows that are American. All
of these ideas and concepts are in turn influencing their culture.
When I hear the term "cultural otherization" I think of teachers
having the potential to give students the idea that their culture is
inferior to that of the teacher's self culture If the teachers to not
make students feel that their culture is valuable. Having students
articulate their own definition of culture is a great start to get an
idea of what prior knowledge your students have. Maybe they
know a lot about culture in general, but they struggle with their
own culture and their own identity. I think that teachers should
build awareness about stressed caused by cultural adjustments. Not
only should the teacher be aware, but also he or she should make
his or her students aware of how stressful making a cultural
transition can be.

11. Historical Roots
• The word culture comes from early Latin, colere, which means to
till or cultivate the ground.
• Since it is a contested and elusive concept, there are different
ways of defining culture (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952):
• Enumeratively distinctive ( a list of the content of culture, values,
Four Fs)
• Historical (emphasis on social heritage, tradition)
• Psychological and cognitively (learning, habit, adjustment,
problem-solving device, metaphors)
• Structural (focus on the pattern or organization of culture,
systemic whole, patterns)
• Genetic (focus on the origin of culture)

12. Recent Approaches to Culture
• Interpretivism
• Socio-cognitive perspective
• Critical Turn: Cultural Otherization and Orientalism

13. Interpretive approaches
• Concentrates on creation of meaning (Clifford Geertz): Culture means
WEBS OF SIGNIFICANCE. People create meanings through interactions
(spun the web and are suspended in them.)
E.G. There are studies which focus on graffitis and street art, and how grafittis
are used to express certain feelings of protest, anger, etc.
• Moran’s five dimensions of culture (See Shaw’s Example in her blog)
• Culture as iceberg: Tacit and explicit dimensions of a culture.
• Getting inside the emic view: “We as language teachers need to acquire
more information about culture—its
products, practices, perspectives, communities, and persons.” (p. 29)
Also, see an ESL teacher’s experience in Moran PAGE 29-31

14. Socio-cognitive Approach
• Intergroup perspective: Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and
Turner, 1986; Tajfel, 1978)
Intergroup perspective replaces the construct of culture with the construct
of group. Focuses on how group membership is created and how
distinctions between in groups and out-groups are sustained:
• how people identify with groups , how others identify people as
members of groups
• how groups define themselves and are defined by others
• how groups separate themselves from others and/or compare
themselves with other groups

15. Socio-cognitive
• Aspirations and attitudes toward self and society:
People have both an individual and a social identity.
Three basic principles:
- Individuals strive to achieve or maintain a positive
social identity
- Positive social identity is based to a large extent on
favorable comparisons that can be made between the
in-group and out group
- When social identity is unsatisfactory, individuals
either leave their group to a some positively distinct
group or try to make their group more positively
distinct

16. Critical Turn: Otherization
and Orientalism
Otherization
• Reductive process that ascribe an imagined superior identity to the Self and an
imagined inferior identity to the Other. “Colonizers systematically devalue the
colonized and how develuation expends to every aspect of life. See Memi’s The
Colonizer and the colonized.
Orientalism (coined by Edward Said)
• Western representation of the Other (i.e. East). “Orientalism is a systematically
constructed discourse by which the West “ was able to manage—and produce—
the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, scientifically, and
imaginatively” (Said, 1978). Eg. Accents of Arabs in Aladdin. Aladdin is also
Arab bur speaks English in Standard English.
• Produces an essentialist and static Other. “The discourse of orientalism is built
on binary oppositions between East and West.
• Cultures, just like people, are not islands by themselves. They are all
interconnected, making every culture, in effect, a hybrid culture.

17. Ethnocentrism
• “ Our tendency to consider our own cultural
practices as superior and consider other cultural
practices as inferior” (Wintergerts & mCveigj, 2011,
p. 14)

18. The discourse of Orientalism
Interview with Edward
Saidhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwCOSkXR_
Cw
• Take notes: What are some of the key arguments
behind orientalism? What examples does Said give
to Orientalism?

19. Postmodern approaches to
culture
Post-modern/post structural: Culture is no neatly packaged
entities. They are NOT exclusive bodies of customs, values and
thoughts. They are NOT perfectly shared by all who subscribe to
them. Realities are subject to change.
Contact zone: The social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and
grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of
power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they
lived out in many parts of the world today”. (Pratt, 1991, p.
34)—bordercrossing/borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua.
Cultures as travelling (Clifford): Unrooted, permeable, ever-
developing and changing.

20. Postmodernism
• “Postmodern thought values alternative discourses and meanings rather than…
goals, choices, behavior, attitudes, and personality. Postmodern social scientists support
a refocusing on what has been taken for granted, what has been neglected, regions of
resistance, the forgotten, the irrational, the insignificant, the repressed, the
borderline, the classical, the sacred, the traditional, the eccentric, the sublimated, the
subjugated, the rejected, the nonessential, the marginal, the peripheral, the
excluded, the tenuous, the silenced, the accidental, the dispersed, the disqualified, the
deferred, the disjointed” (Roseneau, 1992, p.8 in Baldwin et. al, 2006, p. 20-1)

21. Commonalities…
• Culture is an elusive concept.
• It plays an important function in people’s and
communities’ lives.
• Cultures are interconnected, making every culture a
hybrid one. (Geertz “culture move live an octopus”)
• Some cultures play a gatekeeping functions. Still, it
is the individual people and groups that shape (or
cannot) cultural transformation.

22. Definitions of culture:
1) A culture is “a text the vocabulary and grammar of which its
members learn” (Fay, 1996)
2) “Culture is a verb” (Street, 1991)
3) Culture is an “evolving connected activity, not a thing”. (Fay,
1996).
4) Believing…that man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those
webs (Geertz, 1973)
Your ideas?: What is important is NOT what culture is BUT
culture does.

23. Language and culture
Moran and Hinkel

24. Culture and interaction
• Culture as a hidden curriculum (Byram, 1989)
“Leaners do not simply shake of their own culture and
step into another culture. Their culture is a part of
themselves and created them as social beings”
• The learning of a second/foreign language entaisl
adjustments of the linguistic and cultural systems.

25. Studies of culture and sociolinguistics: Key
terms and concepts
• Social anthropology: Way of life, identity, beliefs and emotions
(Geertz, 1973)
• Connection between language and culture: Moving beyond
four Fs “foods, folklore, and facts” (Kramsh, 1991)
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: language representing human
experience
Strong version: Language determines thought
Weak version: Language influences thought
• Social meaning are encoded and linguistically represented in
speech events (Hymes): Speech events: All forms of language
including speaking writing, pictorial governed by social and
linguistic norms.

26. Hymes Chapter 2
• “The goal of culture interaction cannot be to replicate the
socialization process experienced by natives of the culture
but to develop intercultural understanding” (Byram, 1991, p.
22).
Is foreign culture less learnable than foreign language?
How is it possible to create an intercultural understanding of
the target culture?
Is it possible to become cognitively like members of other
cultures? Can we learn to construct the world from different
eyes?

27. Discussion Facilitation
by…
Amy Wolf
Kelley O’Reilly
Kaitlyn Swift

28. Group Discussion: Critical
Cross-cultural Incidents
• Critical incident is a cross-cultural situation where
communication breakdown might occur among the
interlocutors.
• Please read the critical incidents and discuss what
has caused the conflict. How would you approach to
this incident?