The Potential Impact of Culture Exploration on Taiwanese High School English Classrooms

The Potential Impact of Culture Exploration on Taiwanese High School English Classrooms

         In her thought-provoking essay, “Living with ambiguity: Toward culture exploration in adult second-language classrooms,” Roumiana Ilieva (2001) suggests a teaching strategy for addressing cultural ambiguity in adult second-language classrooms. Unlike the traditional approaches to cultural teaching that perceive culture as a static and prescriptive entity, her pedagogical strategy named “culture exploration” places a premium on cultural inconsistencies which are the intrinsic nature of cross-cultural interactions. This approach starts from “employing techniques of ethnographic participant observation in and outside the classroom,” (Ilieva, 2001, p. 1) through which students are required to observe and record what they see and how they feel in observed cultural settings. The ethnographic fieldwork is followed by “reflective-interpretive-critical dialogue in the classroom,” (Ilieva, 2001, p. 8) where students will draw on their accounts of observed scenarios to speculate on plausible meanings and interpretations of given situations. Instead of being bombarded with fixed cultural facts, students are allowed to critique stereotypes and create “their own third culture,” (Ilieva, 2001, p. 13) where they can develop their own voice and search for personal positions within target culture. Empowered to negotiate and validate their one-of-a-kind cultural experiences, students may eventually develop an increased awareness of acknowledging cultural uncertainty and fluidity that constitute their everyday encounters.

        Culture exploration per se turns away from the unitary perspectives of culture, allowing more flexibility with respect to how we perceive cultural experiences. Given its dialogue-oriented and open-ended attributes, this approach, in my opinion, prescribes an antidote to the predicament of cultural instruction in Taiwanese high school English classrooms. For one thing, it can resolve a dilemma over whether teachers should shy away from the cultural issues they are unfamiliar with. For another, it can help cultivate teachers’ and students’ cultural awareness.

Take the English teachers of the school I teach for example. The ways in which they tackle the cultural topics in English textbooks are problematic. As they find the cultural topics alienated from their personal experiences and background knowledge, for example Taiwanese glove puppetry, Bulgarian gestures and American football, they would eschew these cultural issues to conceal their ignorance and anxiety about something beyond their reach. Some of them would directly skip the three lessons with their promise given to their students that they will be exempted from examinations on the content of these three lessons. The others would ignore the texts of the three lessons, focusing on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary instead. Thus, neither of these approaches can help students develop their cultural awareness.

Nevertheless, this negligence can be avoided if culture exploration is applied to Taiwanese high school English classrooms. Putting emphasis on the variability of cultural experiences, this teaching strategy can be viewed as an effective approach to engaging students in classroom discussions where teachers might be relieved of their onus of inculcating in students “dubious generalized cultural patterns” (Ilieve, 2001, p. 2). What’s more, given carte blanche to open up any possibility in the process of cultural exploration, both teachers and students might feel invigorated to discuss and delve into the unexplored issues, thereby developing their self-reflection and cultural consciousness in language classrooms. Being placed in a context where culture is re-conceptualized as an inherently dynamic and unpredictable system, teachers and students are thus empowered to seek their own interpretations of any cultural activities in an interactively conversational environment.

This paper illustrates the potential impact of Ilieva’s (2001) culture exploration on Taiwanese high school English classrooms. I argue that this viable approach would create a win-win situation for teachers and students. Since there are no clear-cut answers to cultural events, teachers and students may be more willing to probe for more possibilities within “their own third place” (Ilieva, 2001, p. 12). Although this strategy provides teachers with a feasible alternative to cultural instruction, more research on how to develop EFL teachers’ cultural sensitivity is needed. Now that culture is ever-changing and fluid, in addition, I suggest future researchers examine the extent to which the dominant cultures such as American and British cultures might be affected or reproduced in ESL/EFL classrooms. More important, the concept of cultural ambiguity should be widely disseminated to ESL/EFL classrooms. After all, one of the most effective ways to fare well in cross-cultural encounters is to “take nothing for granted” (Ilieve, 2001, p. 12) and welcome ambiguity with open arms.