BYRAM, Michael. Cultural studies in foreign language education. Clevedon, England: Multilingual matters, 1989.

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 foreign language teaching and education 8
3 cultural studies within foreign language teaching 39
4 contemporary views on cultural studies 58
5 analysing, describing and understanding a foreign culture .80
6 psychological dimensions of cultural studies learning .102
7 cultural knowledge and cultural information some empirical evidence..120
8 A model for language culture teaching..149
References 149
Index.. 159
Preface
The pages which follow have two distinct functions. They encapsulate my thoughts about foreign language teaching as
they have developed in the last decade and more whilst I have been teaching French and German to English
comprehensive school pupils and subsequently training others to do so. In this respect these pages are retrospective
and reflect my dissatisfaction with some changes in emphasis in foreign language teaching in what have nonetheless
been twenty years of genuine progress. Foreign language teaching is, both in my experience as learner and teacher and
in my pedagogic philosophy, as education, an emancipation from the confines of ones native habitat and culture; the
current emphasis on language teaching as skill training is apt to lose that from sight.
This book is also exploratory and prospective. It includes some of my efforts to clarify how the educational value of
foreign language teaching can be made more available and accessible to learners and teachers alike. It explores some
theoretical avenues and reports some empirical investigation of how learners can be given the opportunity and
encouragement to escape from their own habitat and culture, however briefly and in full acceptance that they will
return to it but with a new perception of it and themselves. For the cultural emancipation of language learning is an
experience whose complexity is far from exhausted by reference to grammar, semantics, visits to foreign countries,
reading foreign literature, studying foreign political systems, social issues and historical events. It is all these
intellectual endeavours and much more. It is the emotional experience of abandoning ones language in the first few
lessons of foreign learning, of saying goodbye to home and country on the first visit abroad, of becoming enamoured
of exotic places, food, people and perhaps one special person however near or distant the destination might be
from ones native frontiers. I believe that insufficient attention is paid by teachers and researchers to all of this and
have written this book as part of my efforts to examine foreign language learning as education in its many-faceted
complexity.
p. viii
The book has been written contemporaneously and, in many of its aspects, integrally with an empirical research
project financed by the Economic and Social Research Council. One chapter is written jointly with two of my
colleagues on that project, Dr Venonica Esarte-Sarries and Ms Susan Taylor, who have both contributed more to this
book than the chapter which bears their names; I am grateful to them both for listening and commenting in many
conversations. The project, The effects of language teaching on young peoples perceptions of other cultures, was
planned by Dr Patricia Allatt and myself. To Dr Allatt, who worked on the project for one year full-time and as
consultant for the following two years, I owe a great debt of intellectual gratitude.

In addition to this theoretical and empirical work within our national and regional confines, I believe that work on
language learning should itself break through the paradoxical tendency of language teachers and researchers
particularly in Britain to concern themselves only with their own national scene. To this end I have sought to
establish co-operative work with other researchers in western Europe, initially through an international symposium on
cultural studies in language teaching in Durham in 1986 (financed by the Economic and Social Research Council and
the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft). Through this I have of course benefited intellectually and personally and owe
much to all the members of that symposium, but particulary to Dieter buttjes
Introduction
p. 1
This is a book written by a language teacher for language teachers about the hidden curriculum of foreign language
(FL) teaching. I refer to that part of foreign language teaching which conveys information, attitudes, images and
perhaps even prejudice about the people and countries where the particular language is spoken.
I would wish to make it clear from the beginning that I am writing about foreign language teaching, by which I refer to
language teaching, e.g. French, in classrooms situated in a different linguistic environment, e.g. a Danish folkeskole, as
part of the learners general education. I would contrast this with second language teaching, taking place within a
target language environment
p. 2
I have already mentioned the context for foreign language teaching with which I am most concerned: general
education. I am concerned above all with the work of the foreign language teacher in ordinary usually secondary
schools throughout the Western world. Their pupils come to school because schooling is obligatory and they learn a
foreign language because it is part of general education. The justifications and explanations offered for foreign
language teaching are varied, and to some extent influenced by the educational philosophy and traditions of particular
countries or by the position of the national language on the international linguistic market place. It is with the
everyday business of foreign language teaching and learning in the ordinary classroom that I am concerned when
discussing how, what and why people learn about other countries, other peoples, other ways of life while they are
learning a foreign language.
p. 22
Conclusion
The argument put forward here can be summarized as follows. There is and has always been in foreign
language teaching a contribution to the personal education of learners in terms both of individuals learning about
themselves and of social beings learning about others. This element is profoundly linguistic because as individuals and
as social beings learners are linguistic animals. It is equally fundamentally cultural, because language is inseparable
from culture. Thus as learners learn about language they learn about culture and as they learn to use a new language
they learn to communicate with other individuals from a new culture. As part of this personal education element of
language teaching, learners are taught to use a foreign language. The use is primarily a question of making possible
social contact with people from a different culture.
p. 39
3 Cultural Studies within Foreign Language Teaching
In Chapter 1, three interwoven strands were identified in the web of language teaching: experience o flanguage use for
communication, awareness of the nature of language and the study of cultures. It is the purpose of this chapter to tease
out the warp and weft and to investigate in greater detail the relationship between the three strands. The nature of the
relationship will be significant for cultural studies in a number of ways. Above all, it will have bearing on the learning
and teaching process and consequently on the constantly resurgent issue of methods and techniques.
The three strands identified within language teaching can be placed into two categories: language use and language
awareness on the one hand and cultural studies on the other. This categorization implies a separation of language from
culture in a way which is common within the language teaching profession and which seems to have a commonsense
and intuitive basis, at least where pedagogy is concerned. [] The relationship between language and

p. 40
culture, whether in general or in a particular case, is of course an extremely complex problem which has
psychological, sociological and political dimensions, each worthy of study beyond the confines of this book. It would,
however, be shirking responsibility to proceed to discussion of the learning of language and culture within language
teaching simply on intuitive or commonsense grounds. The following is no more than an attempt to discuss the
relationship in general with the particular purposes of language teaching in mind.
A number of distinctions can be made. First there is the fact that language, and language variety dialect or sociolect
is one of the overt signs of cultural identity which people meet daily in their lives. Individuals use language varieties
with vaying degrees of self-awareness to signal their social identity, often accommodating their language to the
requrirements of situations and interlocutors. [] for individuals or for whole groups, regions or nations, language is a
way of marking cultural identity comparable to other cultural markers such as dress, housing, or social instructions.
Language differs, on the other hand, from other cultural phenomena in that it is used to refer to other phenomena and
has usually to be used to refer beyond itself. To wear a particular article of clothing is to make a choice within the
system of clothing and to make a statement about clothing which also has connotations of personal, social and perhaps
political attitudes. Ti is also possible to express social and political allegiance through choice of language variety.
Speaking a social class dialect is an expression of allegiance in so far as the speaker chooses to keep his dialect or
switch to another. Using the vocabulary of communism is a means of signaling