On Teaching Culture at Korean University English Classrooms

On Teaching Culture at Korean University English Classrooms

  Teaching and learning English as a foreign language cannot evade the question of culture, for it is bound to be an encounter not only with a foreign way of speaking but a foreign way of living, feeling, thinking, and believing. Culture, as a total way of life, both includes and informs language use and language instruction. It is therefore being irresponsible, if not blatantly cynical, for the US-made EFL textbooks to offer only meager and cursory notes on American lifestyle, assuming that the patchy sketches of daily life in a restricted (and often abstracted) sector of American society represent not only the complex multi-cultural American society itself but nothing less than the “World” as such. Such imperial imposition of a highly selective picture of American culture and that of the World as such repeats the brutal history of imperial language policy of the British in their colonies. It also reduces the learner’s identity as that of a potential under-class asylum seeker in the US, who only needs to know the rudimentary rules for daily survival. If the learners are to be trained to become something more than pliant Man Fridays’ serving their English-speaking (American) Masters, a critical in-depth exploration of the Master’s culture is indispensable.