ELT Cultural Representation

Introduction:

The issue of culture representation in ELT textbooks has always been a controversy among linguists all over the world. Although researchers have made attempts to raise questions about how culture is depicted in such textbooks, their studies are restricted to mainly investigating into the depth of culture representation in ELT textbooks in countries other than Vietnam, where culture in textbooks has not been paid due attention to in English education (Nguyen, 2011). This study investigates both the content and the breadth of the picture of foreign culture in ELT textbooks when examining the perspectives of foreign culture represented in ELT textbooks for 1st year non-major students in Vietnam.

What is culture?

Culture is one of the most difficult concepts in the human and social science (Hall, 1997). There has been a lot of controversy on the definitions of culture among cultural scholars for the past years. More traditionally, culture is said be the sum of great ideas, as represented in the classic works of literature, painting, music and philosophy – the “high culture”. In a more modern approach, culture is seen as the widely distributed forms of popular music, publishing, art, design and literature, or the activities of leisure time and entertainment describing the daily life activities of a majority of people, which is named the “mass culture” or “popular culture”. Soraya and Saeed (2012) define the term “culture” as the common system of knowledge of a group of people. It includes a variety of components such as values, beliefs, attitudes, notions of appropriate behavior, statuses, role expectations, and worldview (notions of time, space, and cosmology). It also includes material objects and knowledge about the...

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... (2001) suggests placing fluent international English speakers using English for cross-cultural communication into the central circle without mentioning they are native or non-native. Modiano’s model is of great value because the global use of the English language calls for global cultural awareness rather than focusing only to the target language culture, which is American or British only.

It is widely accepted that the English language has now gained a worldwide lingua franca status and has been considered “a medium of intercultural communication”(Seidlhofer, 2003, p.9). This is due to the fact that the number of non-native speakers of English already outnumbers the native ones. Although these interchangeable terms define the attitudes, expectations, and norms of EIL differently, they negotiate the authority and identity of English language speakers.