Why is it so difficult to teach language as culture?

German Quarterly, The, Wntr, 2008 by Katra Byram, Claire Kramsch

In her much quoted article in Profession 2002, titled "Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration," Mary Louise Pratt reflects on the difficulty of communication across cultures using the example of the clash in worldviews between the conquered Incas in Peru and the Spanish Crown at the end of the 18th century. (1) She refers to the work of translation that was needed then by both sides to apprehend the cultural imagination of the other. Referring to Clifford Geertz's famous essay on translation, she writes: "The path to apprehending the cultural imagination of another people, Geertz says, runs not behind the interfering glosses that connect us to it, but through them" (30). The interfering glosses that connect us to another culture are, in part, the language of the other. Pratt suggests that language learning might best be viewed as an exercise in "cultural translation." The idea of cultural translation is predicated on the ability to understand another culture on its own terms. In Geertz's words: "Translation is not a simple recasting of others' ways of putting things in terms of our own ways of putting them (that is the kind in which things get lost), but displaying the logic of their ways of putting them in the locutions of ours; a conception which again brings it rather closer to what a critic does to illumine a poem than what an astronomer does to account for a star" (10).

A recent report by the Modern Language Association (MLA) calls this ability to understand another culture on its own terms "translingual and transcultural competence" and suggests it should be the goal of every college foreign language major.

   The idea of translingual and transcultural competence places value
   on the multilingual ability to operate between languages [...]
   Students learn to reflect on the world and themselves through
   another language and culture. They comprehend speakers of the
   target language as members of foreign societies and grasp
   themselves as Americans, that is, as members of a society that is
   foreign to others. [...] This kind of foreign language education
   systematically reflects on the differences in meaning, mentality,
   and worldview as expressed in American English and
   in the target language. [...] In the course of acquiring functional
   language abilities, students are taught critical language
   awareness, interpretation and translation, historical and political
   consciousness, social sensibility, and aesthetic perception. (MLA
   3-4)

Language teachers tend to agree with the notion that what needs to be taught is critical language awareness, interpretive skills, and historical consciousness, but while they find the idea inspiring and exciting, they also find it difficult, if not impossible, to implement. One German teacher wrote for many when she wrote:

   I agree that culture must be an integrated part of the curriculum,
   not something to be relegated to "culture day" and not something
   treated, as Hadley says, entirely by the "4Fs" of "folk dances,
   festivals, fairs, and food" or the "Frankenstein approach" of "a
   taco from here, a flamenco dancer from here." However I think
   [people] expect too much from the foreign language teacher,
   assuming a cultural knowledge and an ability to overlook the
   teacher's own native attitudes that may not actually be present. I
   think culture is best taught by direct experience: meeting people
   from the country being studied (either in "real life" or via
   letters or e-mail), watching films, or at the very least using
   realia as tools for learning the other skills. [Teaching] methods
   [that] concentrate on interpretations of literature and minute
   dissections of diction, might, because they rely on the teacher's
   knowledge and not deductions from the students, not be as engaging.
   (Gerchman)

The ideas proposed by this German teacher are excellent, especially the idea of engaging the students and providing them with direct experience. Indeed, realia and personal testimonies bring the culture to life in a way that literary or cultural analyses do not. However, they might not solve the problem. The position of the United States in the world today depends on our understanding others and others understanding us on a much larger and more historic scale than on the level of personal experience. Foreign language teachers are the first to be called upon to foster that understanding, but they are not historians, nor anthropologists, nor sociologists. They are called upon to teach language as it represents, expresses and embodies mindsets and worldviews that might be different from those of our American students. In other words, they are challenged to teach not language and culture, but language as culture.

What makes the teaching of language as culture so difficult? Based on two examples taken from a Deutsch als Fremdsprache teacher training seminar in China and a second-year college German class in the United States, we argue that our understanding of culture is socially and historically contingent and that different views on history are not only difficult to grasp but, for many, impossible to accept. We offer a way of language teaching that approaches language as both a personal and a cultural/historical event and that places individual experience into a larger social and historical framework.