Алдабердикызы А.

Академический Инновационный Университет

Г.Шымкент, Казахстан

Some comments upon Goals of Target Culture Teaching

As culture learning and language learning occur together, there can be no question as to whether culture should be taught or not. In the ideal language class, culture teaching is an integral and additive component of language instruction. Familiarity with the foreign culture motivates students by increasing their interest. It comforts students when they come into contact with the foreign culture by providing information and skills needed for adequate communication. It broadens the students' horizons, awareness of the self and of their own culture and thus makes them more tolerant to other ways and people.

As culture is a very broad concept, it is very difficult for language teachers to decide what to include in their language programs at each level of instruction. Defining the goals of culture teaching is helpful to decide what to teach and when and how. Nostrand (cited in Lafayette and Schulz, Heusinkveld (Eds) 1997:578-579) states a set of goals for cultural instruction:

1. the ability to react appropriately in a social situation;

2. the ability to describe, or ascribe to, a proper part of the population a pattern in the culture of social behaviour;

3. the ability to recognize a pattern when it is illustrated;

4. the ability to "explain" a pattern;

5. the ability to predict how a pattern is likely to apply in a given situation;

6. the ability to describe or manifest an attitude important for making one acceptable in the foreign society;

7. the ability to evaluate the form of a statement concerning a culture pattern;

8. the ability to describe or demonstrate defensible methods of analyzing a sociocultural whole;

9. the ability to identify basic human purposes that make significant the understanding which is being taught.

Later Seelye (1974:38-48) reinterprets these goals and modifies them into seven goals. Seelye claims that if cultural activities in the classroom are to be purposeful, they should in some way relate to one of the seven goals:

1. the sense, or functionality, of culturally conditioned behaviour,

2. the interaction of language and social variables,

3. conventional behaviour in common situations,

4. cultural connotations of words and phrases,

5. evaluating statements about a society,

6. researching another culture, and

7. attitudes toward other cultures.

Although the need and usefulness of each set of goals are clear, there is one problem, which bothers language teachers -the appropriateness of each goal to the foreign language classroom and the students. It is somewhat unrealistic to develop the ability to evaluate statements about a society or the ability to describe defensible methods of analyzing a sociocultural whole. The language classroom is not sufficient to develop all of these goals. Therefore, Lafayette and Schulz (1989:123) suggest the following three culturally oriented goals, which can be tested in most language classes as they will be more realistic goals to pursue in the language instruction.

1. Knowledge: the ability to recognize cultural information or patterns. The goal focuses on factual information about selected patterns of the target culture, the student's ability to recall, recognize, and describe cultural information.

2. Understanding: the ability to explain cultural information or pattern(s). The student needs to comprehend a cultural pattern in terms of its meaning, origin, and interrelationships within the larger cultural context. This goal presupposes not only factual knowledge, but also implies reasoning ability. Students should see the "logic" of a pattern in its own cultural context.

3. Behaviour, the ability to use cultural information or pattern(s). This objective refers to behavioural skills such as the ability to act meaningfully, unobtrusively, and inoffensively in real or simulated cultural situations (Heusinkveld, 1997:581-582).

All three goals listed above are cognitive objectives which aim at enabling the students to develop a greater awareness of and a broader knowledge about the target culture, acquiring a command of the 'ways' of the target people, understanding the values of the target culture and the differences between the target culture and the students' culture thus making them more competent users of the language.

Seelye (1994:25) proposes six instructional goals to develop skills required for intercultural competence:

Goal 1- Interest: The student shows curiosity about another culture and empathy toward its members.

Goal 2- Who: The student recognizes that the expectations and other social variables such as age, sex, social class, religion, ethnicity, and place of residence affect the way people speak and behave.

Goal 3- What: The student realizes that effective communication requires discovering the culturally conditioned images that are evoked in the minds of people when they think, act and react to the world around them.

Goal 4- Where and When: The student recognizes that situational variables and convention shape behaviour in important ways.

Goal 5- Why: The student understands that people generally act the way they do because they are using options their society allows for satisfying basic physical and psychological needs, and that cultural pattern are interrelated and tend mutually to support need satisfaction.

Goal 6- Exploration: The student can evaluate a generalization about a given culture in terms of the amount of evidence substantiating it, and has the skills needed to locate and organize information about a culture from the library, the mass media, people, and personal observation.

Developing these goals is a challenge, but not impossible. These are the attitudes and skills that must be fostered in designing a language curriculum to suit the goal of facilitating intercultural communication. We should be aware of our own and ethnocentric view of reality. It is crucial to establish rapport with people from the target culture. Rapport begins with enough interest in people from other culture; therefore, one should get information about the target culture and country. One should learn how to make sense of the behaviour of the people of target culture. It is important to develop fluency in the language to get accurate meaning from language and an ability to decipher nonlinguistic channels of expression. Without including these instructional goals that focus on the cultural context of communication, the students have little or no chance of developing the range of skills needed to understand and be understood in another culture.

In addition to the goals above, there is a broader objective of foreign language learning: to promote international understanding and cooperation by enabling students to gain access to the life and thought of a people speaking another language. This objective cannot be attained when there is hostility towards the culture of another group. Therefore, in addition to enabling a learner to develop his cultural understanding of that language, one of the objectives of culture teaching should be fostering tolerance and international understanding.

LIST OF REFERENCES:

1. BESSMERTNY, A., 1997. Teaching Cultural Literacy to Foreign-Language Students. English Forum, 32:1, January-March, 1997.

2. BROWN, H. Douglas, 1986. Leaning a Second Language. J.M. Valdes (Ed.), Culture Bound: Bridging the culture gap in Language Teaching. USA: Prentice Hall Regents.

3. HALL, E. T., 1959. The Silent Language. New York: Doubleday.

4. SEELYE. H. N., 1994. Teaching Culture: Strategies for intercultural communication. (3^rd ed.) Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Co.

5. STEELE, H.H., 1991. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: O.U.P.

6. TANG RAMONA, 1999. The place of "culture" in the foreign language classroom: A reflection. The Internet TESL Journal, 5(8).

7. ZDENEK, SALZMANN, 1993. Language, Culture and Society. Westview Press.