Can Teaching Culture be Harmful to Language Learners?
Chapter: Yokohama Event Date: July, 2002 …by Michael Guest. While acknowledging that teaching and learning about cultures is an important element of English teaching, Guest discussed some potentially harmful aspects of culture teaching. The contrastive analysis approach emphasizes differences and has a tendency to reduce cultures to simplified viewpoints which become ‘interpretive pegs.’ According to the presenter, this approach is likely to produce misunderstandings, despite the fact that it is currently the most popular way of teaching culture. The contrastive approach is currently widespread in textbooks, research journals, and academic presentations. Guest contends that teaching culture can be harmful to language learners in four ways: by stereotyping a heightened polemical sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ by providing inaccurate descriptions of culture, by providing a view of cultural artefacts rather than of people, and by producing preconceived notions about how learners should un
