Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley are the co-founders of the online school and training company www.lexicallab.com . They have co-authored two multi-level General English series, Outcomes and Innovations, published by National Geographic Learning, and their first methodology book, Teaching Lexically, came out in 2016. Most recently, they worked on Grammar Nonsense . . . and what to do about it, published by Wayzgoose Press.

www.lexicallab.com

hugh@lexicallab.com

www.instagram.com/lexical_lab

 

Background

When Hania contacted me recently and mentioned the fact that she was keen to republish the article below, which was originally written as a blog post more than 15 years ago now, I was both flattered and slightly taken aback that anyone remembered it. The request prompted me to go back and revisit it, which was an interesting experience. It was written when both my writing partner Andrew Walkley and I were teaching and running CELTA courses at University of Westminster. More or less my whole department was made redundant back in 2014, so reading it brought back some bittersweet memories. It also caused me to reflect on where our own interest in issues around culture came from, and I suspect much of it is down to the fact that we were both state-school kids who grew up in the early 80s - a very politicised era, a post-punk era where pop culture was often counter-cultural and subversive, and where the Thatcher government was incredibly divisive. When we started teaching, we found that not only were we clearly not speakers of the kinds of plummy RP accents that were still presented in coursebooks back then as models of how one should speak, but that the worlds we’d grown up in weren’t represented. What we found instead in the coursebooks we first used were very restricted visions of British culture, visions that excluded most urban life, that harked back to an idyllic past, and that were predominantly mono-cultural in their approach. I was reminded of a time when I was working in Indonesia and had to do a text about ‘festivals of Great Britain’ with a class there. These festivals included a cheese-rolling festival somewhere out in the West Country. Students looked incredulous and asked ‘So you do this?’ I had to then explain that this was as culturally alien to me as it was to them. At the same time, we both had experience of talking to other teachers who made what we felt were gross over-generalisations about students based on nationality or religion. It was a desire to resist all elements of all of this that led us to bring our own agenda to our writing, first with the Innovations series and then with Outcomes.

We’d like to think that in some small way we’ve helped to bring about positive changes and that things are better now than they were. There’s certainly a broader global focus in ELT materials these days, and a far wider range of accents - both native and non-native - represented. Native speakerism is increasingly called out and challenged and we’re far less likely to see coursebooks ask daft questions like ‘What do people in your country usually eat for dinner?’ At the same time, though, the list of words and ideas that are excised from classroom material has, if anything, grown, and there’s still a reluctance to focus on the darker sides of life. There’s also the screamingly obvious fact that there are still plenty of people excluded from this brave new world of global culture. It’s not just that LGBTQIA+ people are excluded, though; it’s also, for example, women who choose to wear the full veil or, indeed, anyone for whom religion is a core part of their identity.

We’re realistic about the degree to which it’s possible to change this in a world where coursebooks are often a huge global enterprise, but we still feel very strongly that teacher trainers and classroom practitioners have a crucial role to play in creating space for learners and in helping them say what they want to say, when they want to say it. We hope the re-print of this piece encourages more people to maybe think a bit more deeply about the positive roles they could play in bringing about change.

 

But, of course,….

Frequently after classes, students will come up to us and ask “But where are you from? You’re not very English!” We’ve both learned to delude ourselves into taking this as a compliment: it must be down to the dark and handsome swarthiness, we reassure ourselves; the warmth, the outgoing personalities; or perhaps it’s the fact we’re both good with languages, chatty, possessed of a lust for life. These moments help us stave off the sad fact that we’re really both scruffy, prone to mumbles and rants, somehow inherently shabby in the way only those reared on bacon sandwiches and milky tea can truly ever be!

At home, however, it’s often a totally different story. We both have non-British partners, and the last line of attack, the riposte to which there is no return, is always “God! You’re so bloody ENGLISH!” This can mean anything from you’re the kind of sad, repressed person who walks out of the room to break wind to why on earth can’t you phone someone just because it’s after 10 in the evening! It could be quiet rage at our not wanting to talk about sex - or even really talk at all very much full stop, or else anger at our refusal to ever admit to feeling down or pissed off when the sticky brown stuff starts hitting the ventilation system. Whatever, it’s all really rather confusing. We are both English by birth and by upbringing. We both feel intensely connected to certain aspects of life in Britain, repelled and appalled by others. And yet in the eyes of the outside observer, we both flit back and forth across a line of some supposed cultural finality.

The first point to make here is that both national identity and the notion of culture that it is so frequently associated with are far more complex than the simple retorts above suggest. However, it still tends to be the trite and the simplistic which prevails within EFL. Culture in English language teaching materials is a simple black and white affair; or rather, it is all too often simply white: quite literally in terms of who gets to be represented and also more metaphorically in that it’s often antiseptic, anodyne, bleached and sanitised and bland.

As teacher trainers, this becomes most apparent when watching trainees use widespread EFL materials. Trainees generally come to the classroom with little or no experience and thus view the coursebook as an expert source of knowledge and as somehow implicitly right. The notion of culture as propagated in coursebooks tends to either revolve around the presentation of literature as a vehicle for culture, so Headway Pre-Intermediate, which we used on our last CELTA course, has, for instance, an extract from Dickens which includes such choice lines as “The mild Mr. Chillip sidled into the parlour and said to my aunt in the meekest manner ‘Well, ma’am, I’m happy to congratulate you’”. The many hours of fun to be had by watching trainees on their second teaching practise slot trying to explain to bemused students what a parlour is or how exactly you sidle is tempered only by an awareness that this is singularly useless vocabulary for learners of this level to be learning!

Another angle on the culture issue crops up in a text in an Upper-intermediate book called ‘Soho: my favourite place”. We’re not sure how many of you are familiar with the wonderful mess that is Soho, but the last time we looked, it was still as full of drug dealers, gay bars, meathead bouncers policing dubious late-night binge-drinking establishments, trans people and menacing-looking characters lurking in shadows as it has ever been. Not in Headway, though, of course! Oh no! The nearest any of this comes to impinging on the antiseptic world of the coursebook is the admission that “the place is a bit of a mess”, whilst readers are coyly told that there are “surprises around every corner”. Those of you familiar with a bit of classical mythology may also be surprised to learn that Eros apparently celebrates “the freedom and friendship of youth”!  This is culture as a kind of white-washed national tourist board ad.

All of this is then compounded by a persistent triteness which reduces people from other countries down to their crudest stereotypes, as in yet another Headway text looking at ‘Minding your Manners Around the World’. Here, trainees get to inform students that if they are expecting the arrival of foreign business colleagues, they can be sure that Germans will be bang on time, Americans will probably be fifteen minutes early, Brits will be fifteen minutes late and as for the Italians! Well, you’d best allow them anything up to an hour! The supposed veracity of these gross, offensive stereotypes is not even challenged by the methodology. The kinds of questions students are asked to discuss after reading the text are almost always simply comprehension-based, so they are forced into uncovering ‘Which nationalities are the most and least punctual’, for example. Things are almost as bad elsewhere in the book, where there are post-text questions offered under the seductive heading of ‘What do you think?’ Don’t get too excited, for all too often these are simply glorified comprehension questions in fancy clothes. What, for instance, are students supposed to think about the following: ‘In what ways is our life like a jigsaw? How does winning a lot of money smash the jigsaw? Why do we need work in our lives?’ 

It seems to us that three broad issues arise from all this: the basic question of what exactly culture is, how trainees can be made more aware of it, and how a broader notion of culture leads to methodological changes. We both strongly believe that even initial Preparatory courses such as CELTA should be addressing these thorny areas and will now try to outline some of the ways we’ve tried to do just that.

The title of this paper comes from a comment made to one of us early on in our teaching career, and was, presumably, intended as useful guidance to a rookie teacher and also perhaps as some strange form of protection for any mono-cultural Japanese classes that might later be encountered. The myth of the difference and uniqueness of the monolingual, monocultural context is a damaging one in that it insists on speakers of one foreign language somehow all being equal participants in a shared, mutually agreed upon culture. Those still clinging on to such an idea might like to discuss the following exercise we frequently do with CELTA-trainees at University of Westminster.

 

God Save the Queen?

1. Are the following part of British culture? In what way?

2. Do any of them mean anything to you personally? What?

3. Have you seen any of them mentioned in EFL materials? In what capacity?

God Save the Queen                          bacon and eggs

Balti curries                                       lager

port                                                     the Costa del Sol

a week in Provence                            ballet

the Proms                                           Reggae

Old Labour                                        Conceptual Art

The Beautiful Game                           The environment

bowler hats                                         Notting Hill                           

French art-house films                       Irvine Welsh

Cockney rhyming slang                     Shakespeare

Islam                                                  Sunday school

marijuana                                           Cricket

Direct Action                                      Harrods

car boot sales                                     St. Patrick’s Day

kebab shops                                        Easter

Chinese New Year                              ackee and salt fish

Our own take on this is that all of the above form part of the complex fabric of modern British life in one way or another and that the degree to which each is relevant to any individual with any connection to British culture depends on the webs of micro-cultures we each weave for ourselves. As such, there is very clearly no such thing as ‘British culture’ in any monolithic sense - it is rather, as the axiom has it, horses for courses, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You also cannot make assumptions that, say, reggae and marijuana will always overlap or that Islam should somehow exclude fish and chips! It should also be added that not only will the same intense involvement in a wide variety of micro-cultures be the case for all our foreign learners, but that often - as globally oriented beings - our students will very frequently participate enthusiastically in exactly the same globalised micro-cultures as many native speakers.

This is where so-called non-native speaker teachers, working in the countries of their origin, have a huge advantage over native-speaker teacher imports. The local teachers will almost always know far more about the macro-culture of the country they are teaching in and can thus use all of this knowledge to hook new language onto in ways that are pertinent and meaningful to their students. Once you accept that mono-lingual certainly does NOT mean mono-cultural, at least when one is thinking of culture in terms of micro-cultures, then the gap that then remains can be envisaged less as cultural and far more helpfully as a purely linguistic one, with any attitudinal differences that each participant in any micro-cultural discourse might feel then being acknowledged and negotiated through language. Such an understanding of the way we all contain and negotiate a vast variety of cultures within our day-to-day lives will hopefully result in the end of essentialising comments about what ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ or ‘Chinese’ or ‘Turkish’ students can and can’t somehow cope with in classes, and will lead instead to a classroom culture in which students in ANY context are given the time, space and language to be first and foremost their own complex selves.

To test the degree to which you yourself bring your own preconceptions and cultural-stereotypical baggage with you, look at the following reformulated versions of things various EFL students have said over the last few months in our classes. Based simply on the evidence available to you, would you care to hazard a guess as to the level, nationality, age, gender and profession of those speaking?

1. I can’t sleep in the same bed as my girlfriend if she falls asleep first, because she immediately starts heating up. Her skin gets so hot, I have to go and sleep somewhere else.

2. We were driving home from the north of the country to the south and we got ambushed by some guerrillas. They started shooting at us. I thought I was going to die, but some soldiers came to help us and there was a big fight and then the guerrillas ran off. A friend of mine got killed.

3. I once passed out on the train home. I’d been drinking with some friends and I got really pissed and I passed out and missed my stop and ended up in the middle of nowhere. It was the middle of the night, so I had to call out my parents to pick me up and take me home. Before they got there, I passed out again in the street and when I came round, I was in the car. I was convinced I was being abducted or something and so I started             screaming at the driver to let me out of the car. It took my dad a couple of minutes to convince me it was him.

4. I hate football!

5. I can’t eat pork or bacon. It’s against my religion.

6. AIDS isn’t just a gay disease. I think straight people can get it, can’t they, if they don’t practise safe sex or have anal sex or whatever.

7. I don’t like Kilburn. I don’t’ feel safe there. There are too many black people round there for my liking.

8. When I go to an important meeting, I usually try to eat onions beforehand. Then, when someone says something I don’t       like, I can fart and stomp out of the room.

9. What does ‘damn’ mean?

10. You’re not very English.

11. They were shagging

12. I know someone who had a sex change operation

In a sense, the nationality, age and background of these students is absolutely irrelevant. Who they are makes itself apparent through what they try to say. However, it is worth noting here that many of the above do break both general taboos and widespread stereotypes, such as the decidedly un-demure Japanese girl in 11, the football-hating man from Brazil in 4, and the Chinese female Education Ministry official in her mid-fifties in 8!

It has been claimed that both the bland cultural agenda that permeates EFL and the kinds of prejudices and stereotypes that many of us might well bring to our assessment of who may - or may not - be uttering the above are the result of some form of cultural imperialism.  However, we feel that while there may be some truth in the idea that certain native-speaker teachers and institutions still cling to these values, most rose-tinted texts and misplaced suppositions actually come about far more from a desire to tend towards the antiseptic.

Our own feeling is that the intent is less imperialistic, but more an angst-ridden expression of the white liberal’s burden, magnified through the commercial interests of global coursebooks. Writers and publishers - and, to some extent, large numbers of classroom practitioners too – push the idea that it is wrong to impose certain cultural values on to other cultures. As a result, it thus becomes inconceivable that one could talk to Arabs about drinking or to Catholics about abortion. The Japanese supposedly do not swear and thus one should refrain from doing so in their company, conversation with Turks about the Greeks is a no-no, and politics and the Chinese must never be allowed in the same classroom. Obviously, homosexuality is thus a taboo with all and sundry! You may yourself be able to recite other mantras which posit various nationalities in similarly restrictive manners. The problem from our perspective is that this kind of agenda sees a problem not just with talking about any of these areas, but also with even mentioning them. Taken to an extreme, this creates an anodyne world where publishers may require the following to be excluded:

Alcohol                       Narcotics                                            Pornography               Sex

Anarchy          Nudes and Flesh                                 Religion                      Sexism

Abuse             Names (without permission)              Racism                                    Stereotypes

AIDS              Politics                                                           Rape                           Terrorism        

Israel               Science (genetic engineering, etc.)    Pork                            Violence

However, we believe that these editorial and self-censorial decisions are based on a multitude of misconceptions. Firstly, there is the fallacy that mentioning or hearing is the same as talking about. In essence, this creates an over-protectiveness towards other people’s cultures which ends up reducing foreign students to the level of children. It is inconceivable that adults in any country never hear these words in their own language or fail to touch upon these topics in their own lives. It is equally clear from our own experience of multi-lingual classes that offence is seldom - if ever - caused by others talking about getting drunk or being Muslim or whatever the particular supposed taboo may be. Teaching words does not mean suggesting they are true for or intimately connected to all students or assuming that the words will be used by all learners to talk about themselves. Indeed, students may instead want to use the words in order to criticise the actions they depict. Part of the problem results from the fact that statements regarding what can and cannot be talked about in the classroom tend to reflect the rather prudish, stiff upper-lip concerns of upper-middle class England. Any list of taboo topics or taboo language items is, therefore, perhaps far more revealing about its authors than it could ever hope to be about those it seeks to protect.

There is also the assumption that cultures are unchanging and dominating factors in society, despite the blatantly obvious fact that ruling parties, religions and gender roles - among many other cultural totems - are in a constant state of flux and are thus the source of great internal debate.

Secondly, it seems to us that notions of self-censorship are based on the supposition that language classes should be oases of harmony and calm, providing respite from the big bad world and that we should therefore eliminate conflict or antagonisms of any serious form - debating the relative benefits of being a doctor or a lawyer or of the choice of washing machines and mobile phones notwithstanding!

Finally comes the very de-skilling and de-humanising supposition that we as teachers would be unable to cope if disagreements on politics or stories of death or debauchery arose. Such a belief is bizarre given that as humans, we constantly deal with such things. We also use the word de-skilling, because being able to understand foreign speakers speak, to be humane in response, and to be perceptive and flexible in relation to the linguistic needs any such situation creates - all almost simultaneously - are highly complex skills, needing training and practice. Furthermore, finding opportune moments to practice these skills is also difficult and needs experience, and we are deprived of such chances by those who wish to dictate what is and isn’t fit for discussion in a language class. The would-be censors are, in effect, preventing the attempt to encourage trainee teachers to ask students questions about themselves and to then help them word their worlds.

So what can we as trainers and developers do about all of this? Well, firstly, we can raise trainees’ - and our own - awareness of the whole complex issue of culture, and we feel there’s no better place to start on this than with the trainees’ own national cultural artefacts and products. We can also encourage trainees to take critical perspectives on the way in which culture is represented in coursebooks, by, for instance, comparing their own experience of Soho with that depicted in Headway. Secondly, it is vital that we avoid stereotyping ourselves. Do us all a favour and throw away any sessions you’ve got on how to teach the Japanese or how not to offend the Arabs. Thirdly, we need to be aware of and vigilant against trainees’ attempts to stereotype. For instance, one of our recent CELTA trainees, in his student profile, claimed that the student under the microscope “was a typical Korean in that she spends all her spare time with people from her own culture, as I’ve found most Asians generally do”. This cannot be allowed to pass unchecked! And as for the delegate at a recent international conference who revealed his earth-shattering discovery that the “Japanese cannot think”! Well, add your own expletives and mail them on to him! Finally, we need to start thinking about how we can give students the time, space and language to speak about themselves - should they wish to - and how we, as language teachers, respond to them.

 

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