1. Teaching English Across Cultures

It was unexpected, rather, surprising, for me that culture teaching should be taken into consideration when we teach English. According to McKay (2003), there are three levels of culture in teaching English: Source Culture, Target Culture, and International Culture. 

This categorization is based on the concept of Kachru's Circle (1989), which classified cultures into three levels, depending on how the English language is treated in society. For example, a culture in a country where English is spoken as a native language is Target Culture. On the other hand, in a country where English is spoken as a foreingn language, their culture is Source Culture. International Culture indicates all the other cultures in non-English speaking countries.

McKay (2003) states that teaching culture matters because learners of English come from different countries, which means their cultural backgrounds are different, so are situations where English is used.
 
Peter Neff and John Rucynski Jr. (2013) addressed the insightful but slightly amusing anecdote in their literature. When office workers in Japan enter or leave the office, they greet with the word, "Otsukare sama desu/deshita" in a formal way. However, in Target Culture, where English is a mother tongue, they greet with "See you" ("Mata ne" in Japanese) in a casual way but no one do the same in the Japanese setting. If we literally apply the usage of target language to situations in a different country, it would lead to failure. Therefore, teaching three levels of culture in English teaching is important.

With this concept in mind, I looked at the English course book of our high school, thinking about how I can teach three levels of culture with our textbook: LANDMARK Fit English CommunicationⅢ, published by Keirinkan. Then, surprisingly, most of the lesson topics contain less cultural perspectives. That is to say, themes are very neutral, such as penguins, caffeine, biomimetics, non-verval communication, and mathematical skill of animals. How can we teach cultural aspects with this type of textbook, in which five lessons out of ten are avoiding interferring cultural issues?

In any way, culture teaching is possible even in a short expression, "yellow journalism" (lecture in Module 1), which is "a common U.S. term referring to a certain type of journalism but has no special meaning for people in other cultures."

Reference 
Neff, P. & Rucynski, J. (2013). Tasks for Integrating Language and Culture Teaching. English Teaching Forum, 51(2),12-23. 


    

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