nhances symbolic power instead of resulting in cultural awareness as a basis for developing empathy and tolerance. Rather than remaining in a subject - object relationship with the learners within which they are 'instructed' or taught about culture, textbooks and teachers need to open up ways in which learners can gain insights into the foreign culture in a subject - subject relationship; in other words, a dialectic process between equals. Is it possible for textbook authors to provide material and tasks which can assist such a process?
What to teach?
Before trying to come up with answers, we need to examine how cultural knowledge and cultural and socio-cultural competence are dealt with in many foreign language textbooks and classrooms today. Teaching culture has focused mainly upon two aspects:
a) leaching about the foreign culture
b) teaching and learning of socio-linguistic and socio-cultural behaviour within the framework of a communicative approach
As far as a) is concerned, traditional textbooks have contained a series of texts, often created by the authors, about the foreign culture, followed by reproduction exercises with the aim of learning and accepting facts. The knowledge taught in such a context has, in some countries, been termed 'background' or 'civilization' in English, 'Landeskunde' in German. The word 'background' is in itself quite revealing if we analyse what view of culture is inherent in this type of teaching. It implies forming the backgro英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】und to something else, namely language, which is in the 'foreground', and, therefore, must be regarded as more important. This view creates a dividing line between culture and language, seeing them as separate entities rather than two aspects of the same. However important the facts in themselves may be, the language in which they are presented, and what the learners are supposed to do with the facts, are a crucial means of developing cultural awareness.
Textbooks for primary and lower secondary school have dealt with b) through dialogues and patterns of ritual speech acts of what to say in specific situations followed by, for instance, role play exercises of similar situations. This methodology in its extreme form resulted in coursebooks which were almost devoid of content.
If our aim is to give learners an opportunity to develop cultural awareness, neither a) nor b) is sufficient. Both are important, yet there is something missing. In order to find out what this is, I believe it is necessary to take a closer look at what we today conceive of as 'culture'.
Whose culture?
If we look at the term historically, culture was seen purely as the classical cultural heritage up to the Early Renaissance. During the Romantic period 'national culture and identity' and 'the way people lived' were included in an understanding of the term. Today we can talk about at least two types of culture, 'culture of the elite' and 'culture of the people', or 'elitist' culture and 'common
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