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Foreign culture as a mirror of our own

A Japanese person realizes how centrally important cleanliness is in their culture by noticing just how much dirtier Rome, London and Frankfurt are than Tokyo or Osaka. An Italian or a French person goes to Helsinki and notices how silent Finnish people tend to be. The Parisian or the Roman learns the Finnish proverb: You have one mouth and two ears - use them in that proportion.

The Latin person realizes that, compared to Finland, he/she belongs to a loquacious culture where speaking somehow takes up more room than listening. Our own culture is our default mode-we take many of its presuppositions and beliefs to be simply “normal”, rational behavior. It is only when we come up against the massive reality of another way of doing things that we realize that the things we do and take for granted are relative and not an absolute mark of being human. How can we use “culture” in the language classroom? Let me offer you an exercise that you can do with a culturally homogeneous or with a heterogeneous class.

1. Dictate the passage that follows: “Students must realize their duties. They are the future administrators, soldiers, statesmen and teachers. They should try to become ideal students so they can play their roles in a good manner. An ideal student is one who has true discipline. He knows the value of self-control and does not like useless and foolish activities. He applies his sense of judgment and does not follow others blindly. He is obedient and respectful. He respects his parents and his teachers. He does not believe in wasting the first months of the year and then working overtime in the last months. He works regularly and continuously.”
2. Ask the students to underline the sentences they agree with and cross out those they disagree with.
3. Group the students in fours to discuss their reaction to the Iranian text.
4. If you have a culturally mixed class, group the students in culturally homogeneous subgroups to draw up the profile of the “ideal student” in their culture. (7-10 sentences) Explain that they are to write the convictions of their culture, not their own personal opinions. If your class is a mono-cultural one, ask the groups of four from step 3 to draw up the profile of the “ideal student” (7-10 sentences) focusing on generally agreed traits.
5. Ask the groups to read out the profile they have written to the whole class.

My experience is that in the above exercise people, first of all react to the very clear Iranian statement of values and then go on to make explicit some of their own values in the area. This is what I mean by using a foreign culture as a mirror for one’s own. By challenging our cultural values, the foreign culture forces us to be explicit about what we implicitly believe. Physical exercises will sometimes be very useful in getting at cultural concepts and bringing them into clear focus. Let me take an Italian cultural keyword, menefreghismo (couldn’t care less), and let us look at how this can be more deeply understood by modeling it physically.

1. Group the students in sets of 4-5.
2. Tell them they have 10 minutes to prepare
“statues” of menefreghismo using their own bodies. All the students should be involved in the statue, and the postures they take up should be possible to hold for 20 seconds. Their “tableaux vivants” will serve to illustrate the many aspects of menefreghismo. Go round helping where needed.
3. Ask each group to come to the front and perform their statue. The others watch. Allow the audience to comment, and then ask the “statue students” to explain their intentions.
4. Each group presents their statue.
5. Round off with general feedback on the place of menefreghismo in the wider context of Italian culture.

If you do this activity with Japanese learners of Italian they will physically experience a cultural reality that is a million miles from their ideals of duty, doing one’s best and “fighting on” (Gambatte). In using drama to try and experience the foreign state of mind and heart, students learn much about their own culture. One thing that amazes me about foreign language teaching is the way many course books fail to deal with anthropological concepts inherent in the target culture, even when these are of strong human interest and often much more juicily interesting than the linguistic detail of the target grammar and lexis. I sometimes feel that we, language teachers, are missing a smiling opportunity if we eschew the teaching of culture.

Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims, UK

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