Page 26 - ELG2505 May Issue 494

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FEATURE

What do we mean by culture in EFL,

and why is it so important?

Andrew Rossiter, author and founder of Linguapress.com investigates.

xcept for Esperanto, which has no international transport and tourism. From to be freed. The fact is that English, just like
native speakers, every single one of this, it is easy to imagine that English, unique other languages, has not parted company
the world’s languages is a product of among languages, has long fled the nest of the from the culture that defines it, and never
Ethe culture of the people among whom cultures that created it; and up to a point this will do.
the language grew and developed to the stage is true. It was this idea that led IBM executive Apart from in the ESP class, where the
that it is at today. Jean-Paul Nerrière, back in 2004, to come culture behind the language studied is not so
In many cases the number of speakers of up with the concept of Globish, a simplified much the culture of native speakers of the
a language is and always has been relatively form of international business English language, but is, as with Globish, a specialised
small - for instance Basque or Lithuanian divested of any cultural background and free corporate scientific or professional culture,
- and the cultural identity easy to define. of figures of speech – a word-based language the teaching of culture is or should be an
By contrast, at the other end of the scale for communication among the world’s large integral part of the English class.
Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English each and culturally diverse international business
have hundreds of millions of speakers, spread community. So, what does “culture” mean, in the
out over large parts of the globe, making Yet Globish, as Nerrière himself stressed, context of the English class?
the cultural background to these languages is not a language; it is a “subset” of English, People have been asking and answering this
diverse and hard to define. a dialect. And the fact that Nerrière and question for hundreds of years. From the
This is particularly the case with English, others thought it useful or necessary to Renaissance until the twentieth century,
which is the (or an) official language in codify forms of English devoid of any cultural culture meant primarily the literature, and
88 countries worldwide, as well as being background is evidence of the huge role secondarily the philosophy and arts produced
used as the main international language of played by culture in the real forms of English by speakers of the two major foreign
business, showbusiness, geopolitics, science, from which they wanted their artificial form languages taught in Europe at the time, the
26 May 2025