Sample task

Answer the following questions.

• Can you think of some stereotypical images people have of your cultural or ethnic group? Write a list.

• Are they generally positive or negative images?

• Which cultural group has this image of your cultural group, e.g. British, French or Japanese people?

• Do you feel that some of the images are true for everyone in your cultural group? If they are not which group would be exempt from these stereotypes?

Seminar Reading

Culture as a noun, Culture as a verb, National culture or Individual culture, which Approach?, Donna Humphrey

(This article was published in Killick, D. & M. Parry (eds.). (1993) Languages for Cross-cultural Capability, Promoting the Discipline: Marking Boundaries Crossing Borders, Leeds Metropolitan University, December 1993.)

This paper explores current approaches to the teaching of cross-cultural and intercultural communication by investigating notions of culture from three perspectives:

• Culture as a national phenomenon;

• Culture as a social phenomenon;

• Culture as an individual phenomenon.

The three perspective will be presented in turn and the notions inherent in each of them explored. The purpose of these explorations is to raise awareness of how our notions of culture affect not only our attitude and views of others but subsequently the methods and approaches we adopt to teach cross-cultural and intercultural communication.

Culture as a national phenomenon

It is important to explore our notions of culture in order to clarify what exactly we mean by 'culture' when we use the term. In its most common usage 'culture' often refers to national culture and is related to notions of national, ethnic and international entities and the differences that are inherent in them. The term is often used by academics and non-academics to refer to 'large' entities such as British, French, Asian and European, Western or Eastern.

However, I see the term 'culture' in this sense as problematic as it conjures up vague notions about nations, races and sometimes whole continents, which, I feel, are overgeneralised and therefore too distorted to be useful. As Holliday argues:

although there is something recognisably 'British' about the British and 'Japanese' about the Japanese, this is more akin to the stereotyping all nations do about each other than the more scientific distinctions we need to make for professional purposes. Its subjectivity is evident in the disdain people often hold for the stereotypes held by others of themselves, which are associated with prejudice'  (Holliday 1994: 126)

It is often easy to talk about 'Arab' culture, 'Japanese' culture or 'African' culture but such cultures, if they are truly identifiable, are so complex and vast that one needs to ask the question to what degree this is a useful device for investigating the interaction between people at the level of communication.

Culture as an ethnic, national or international phenomenon, in its pure sense, sees cultures as fixed, stable, homogeneous entities. Whilst the term culture may also refer to the social and subcultural variations within a culture, these variations are still essentially a part of the national culture concept as they imply something both within and subservient to a particular ethnic, national and international culture...