Culture and English Language Teaching

Abstract

In his dictionary of social science terminology, the critic Raymond Williams (1976: 87) began his entry for culture on a cautionary note:

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.

Given my earlier assertion that a cultural studies perspective places culture at the heart of the coursebook, it is necessary to shed some historical light on this complicated term before looking more closely at what such a perspective entails. Williams points out that in its earliest uses culture was a noun of process referring to crop cultivation. Gradually this meaning was extended to include the metaphoric cultivation of the mind, so that by the eighteenth century it is central to the Enlightenment belief in universal human progress. In this early modern understanding of culture the human spirit is held to liberate itself gradually from the confines of the biological self through a process of spiritual, artistic and scientific education or ‘shaping’.