Raising Cultural Awareness as part of EFL Teaching in Japan: Meta-Cultural Pedagogy

The analyst applied close reading to all resources in each decade. Close reading consisted of the following steps: With each decade synthesis text completed, it was then possible to construct a general outline that organized the findings of each decade into a single document text. This single document allowed the analyst to develop general observational claims regarding developments in the field over the time frame in question The findings of the analysis are limited to the resources the analyst was able to locate using his academic training in the United States and searching from his residence in the United States.

Looking through the reference list, the reader will notice a bias for English-language and US-centric publications. Therefore, the findings presented below must be interpreted with those important limitations in mind. The current review paper provides one perspective on the ELT field and should sit in complement to other literature reviews in circulation. A number of resources in the s set were written for audiences of foreign language teachers in the United States i. It is likely that the literature search process led to these authors because the ELT literature on culture teaching at this time was still emerging.

The conceptual foundations that these authors established in the s have had a lasting impact on language education scholarship, including that of the ELT field. Scholars of culture teaching in the first literature set s draw on structural anthropology in conveying interpretations of culture Lewald, ; Trager, Many writers in this set go to great lengths to draw a distinction between culture-as-aesthetics i. This set of authors defines culture as a system of shared and learned behavior Brooks, ; Imhoof, ; Seelye, , supporting their claims with empirical description and analogies between linguistic and cultural systems.

Nationalized cultures are presupposed in this literature also. A representative definition from the literature set is the following, presented by Trager writing to an audience of foreign language educators in the United States:.

What does culture teaching look like? The content of culture teaching in this set follows from structural understandings of culture. The argument is for culture teaching that addresses Little-C culture, the everyday life for speakers of the target language. In the s readings, language is such a primary content for language teachers that curriculum design and learning objectives are informed by language learning goals first and culture second Fischer, , carrying a theoretical stance made earlier in Lado Trager , however, makes the opposing argument.

The term, intercultural education , appears in this literature but it carries a different denotation from present usage. For authors like Debyser , intercultural competence is about preparing students with cultural knowledge so that they can avoid cultural mishaps in the target culture. In this literature set, there is some acknowledgment of intra-culture variation and its value to culture teaching Lewald, , but little guidance on how to make that happen in a language classroom setting.

Instructional techniques promoted in this literature include the following: Culture capsules and cultural assimilators, well-known culture teaching materials in the present day, are developed during this time too. The capsule details cultural aspects related to multiple domains such as technology , economic organization , social organization , political organization , worldview , esthetics , education , and subcultures. The cultural items that go into the capsule are selected for their anticipated contrast between the home culture of the students and the target culture of the classroom.

Whereas the culture capsule is focused on referential knowledge about a particular culture, the cultural assimilator exercise is intended to draw student sensitivity to cultural perceptions which may differ from their home culture Lafayette, The assimilator exercise takes students through a series of critical incidents which involve a miscommunication or misunderstanding due to contrastive cultural perceptions. With each critical incident scenario, students are to select from several possible responses and then receive feedback on the appropriateness of the response they selected.

Since their emergence in the s, both the culture capsule and the cultural assimilator technique are widely available online at present. Resources in the s set continue the advocacy for Little-C culture teaching noted in the s literature Lafayette, ; Weiss, As was clear in the s set, authors in the s group primarily reference anthropologists in the definitions of culture they present to language educator audiences E.

Hall, ; Nababan, ; Trivedi, Reflecting this deference to structural anthropology, authors define culture as a system of practices, beliefs, and shared values of a group Blatchford, ; Saville-Troike, Descriptions are supported by itemized lists constructed from the ethnographic method e.

Additionally, the link between nation and culture is presupposed as authors detail comparisons of nationalized cultures Jacobson, A representative example of culture definition from this set is provided below, presented by Saville-Troike who was writing for an audience of bilingual educators in the United States. In referencing underlying values and beliefs, Saville-Troike's definition effectively bridges the s decade set where an interest in the non-observable cultural elements becomes more pronounced. For authors in the s set, the content of culture teaching is found in the everyday experiences of native speakers of the target language Blatchford, ; Scanlan, ; Weiss, Holmes and Brown recognize that there is inherent variation within any single culture, but argue that the focus of culture teaching is on native expectations and norms in the most general contexts.

The debate between language-first or culture-first teaching continues in the s set Lafayette, ; Nababan, An important development in the s literature was an explicit caution against aiming for objective analysis of cultures Saville-Troike, This is a precursor of later poststructuralist challenges to positivism. In the s resources, the endpoint for culture learning is communicative competence. The authors develop the concept along two lines. One, communicative competence is about helping students to avoid cultural pitfalls during participation in target culture daily life Seelye, Two, the concept is related to the interpreter role Nababan, , one's ability to mediate two cultural groups.

This focus on developing students who can interpret cultures is a precursor of subsequent evolutions of the term, intercultural competence. The s authors report the development of instructional materials and activities that are consistent with anthropological perspectives Jacobson, ; Lafayette, ; Scanlan, ; Taylor, These include contrastive analyses of nationalized cultures, culture capsules, cultural assimilators, role-plays, discussions, fill-in-the-blunder exercises, authentic materials of various text types, and interpretation of authentic materials.

Lafayette , in particular, develops a lengthy critique of the current condition of culture teaching, noting the outdated reliance on Big-C culture and the audio-lingual method in contemporary foreign language classrooms in the United States. The s resources continue with the basic components of culture developed in the s and s literature including the distinction between observable e. Another development in the s set is increased sensitivity to the diverse and dynamic nature of otherwise coherent cultures Nostrand, These two together lead authors in the s set to complicate attempts at objective descriptions of cultures, something which had been suggested in earlier years.

One sample definition excerpted from Murphy illustrates the dualistic interpretation of culture, as something both objective and subjective simultaneously. Murphy writes that on top of both traditional aesthetic understandings of culture and more recent understandings of culture as human everyday action on nature, one must further acknowledge that. Discussions of culture teaching in the s set continue, in part, previous debates while also introducing new ones. The question of whether or not culture objectives should guide language teaching is a debate carried over from previous decades Allen, ; Higgs, ; Krasnick, ; Murphy, ; Strasheim, Additionally, attempts to formalize culture teaching objectives for the purpose of assessment appear in the s set, a carry-over from the s literature Damen, Two new lines of discussion emerge in the s set.

The first is a shift in how authors interpret the endpoint of student culture learning. This shift can be characterized as a transition from culture-specific to culture-general. Basically, authors such as Strasheim look to culture teaching as primarily about preparing students for participation in unfamiliar cultural settings, the details of which cannot always be pre-determined or fully anticipated i.

This contrasts with previous visions in which the goal of culture teaching is to prepare students for particular culture settings, the details of which are pre-determined i. A culture-general orientation recasts what it means to develop student intercultural competence. Whereas previous interpretations referred to student competence to avoid cultural pitfalls in a specific target culture, under the culture-general orientation, intercultural competence becomes a set of general skills, attitudes, and knowledge that allows students to quickly recognize cultural patterns in unfamiliar settings and to effectively navigate them.

Extending from the culture-general take on intercultural competence, authors in the s set identify student intercultural identity as a primary goal for culture teaching. This debate continues into the present day. In these early treatments of the topic, one can see the beginnings of a critical turn to ELT that emerges in the subsequent decade. Authors in the s resources promote specific materials and techniques for culture teaching.

They demonstrate the collective effort to develop culture teaching materials that are consistent with contemporary understandings of culture i.

Raising Cultural Awareness as part of EFL Teaching in Japan

Specific techniques are familiar such as the culture capsule, culture assimilator, critical incidents, role-plays, and quizzes Allen, ; Damen, ; Krasnick, ; Morain, Ethnography is noted as a promising technique for students Morain, Additional culture teaching techniques are specifically branded as outdated during this time: The s literature set also reveals scholar critique of teacher education programs, which are characterized as disjointed from contemporary ELT scholarship Kramsch, ; Morain, The s literature set represents continued development in how ELT scholars define the concept of culture.

Most striking about the s set is the influx of poststructuralist thought on culture theory e. Authors articulate active challenges to essentialism, which is pre-determining a person's views, attitudes, beliefs, or practices based on generalized characteristics of a given cultural group. Static and internally coherent categories of culture of earlier decades are replaced in the s set with dynamic, fluid, and emergent ones Oxford, Scholars in this set also promote culture as a form of social practice and subjective schema of meaning-making Atkinson, ; Kramsch, The poststructuralist positions adopted by authors in the s elaborate critical arguments introduced in the s literature and continue to push ELT farther away from culture as an objective reality that can be revealed in positivistic social science.

Power also enters into the conversation during this time Atkinson, as ELT scholars challenge received sources of authority in culture teaching. One area of challenge concerns the analytical value of the term, culture , due to its vagueness and frequent essentializing to nations Holliday, This definition captures the increasing complexity of culture brought on by poststructuralist challenges to clear categories and broad generalizing statements about culture. Reading through the s resources, one identifies a gradual abstraction away from clearly-defined content for culture teaching.

As developed in the s set, authors promote a culture-general orientation such that effective culture teaching prepares students for as-yet-unpredictable intercultural settings Byram, An analogy for the turn away from substance i. One might imagine a painting hanging on a museum wall.

The oil painting inside of the frame can be seen as the teachable content in a culture-specific orientation. Take away the painting and only the frame is left. That frame becomes the content for culture teaching under the culture-general orientation. The culture-general orientation, supported by a critical lens, lends itself to culture teaching that is expressly inclusive. Two influential scholars of this time are Byram , and Kramsch , Byram's model of Intercultural Communicative Competence comes to dominate European-centered scholarship in the s.

Briefly, the model consists of five savoirs. Kramsch's definition of culture becomes dominant in US-centered scholarship: Her treatment in this volume also foreshadows her later contributions to the culture teaching literature: Such a stance of cultural relativity then allows students to effectively mediate across cultures. This endpoint state is understood as various terms in the s set: As Byram explains, this endpoint places the focus of culture teaching on the interpersonal relationships shared between individuals in intercultural settings.

Authors describe an array of classroom techniques best suited for poststructuralist conceptualizations of culture: At the same time, other familiar techniques make appearances e. Teaching methods associated with the culture-as-knowledge approach e. Assessment is critiqued for not representing contemporary understandings of culture as systems of meaning-making and the importance of perspective-taking Moore, One corrective response is found in Byram , who offers a detailed treatment of assessment for intercultural communicative competence in the context of foreign language classrooms.

Authors in the s group continue the poststructuralist turn to culture. The example illustrates the layers of complexity that are added on to definitions of previous decades. What is new is the central place for culture as dynamic and culture as a framework of interpretation. Generally speaking, one witnesses in the s literature set a re-aligning of the culture notion to be in tune with globalized realities.

Authors in the s continue to develop poststructuralist thought along three specific strands: In their review of culture teaching literature, Byram and Feng note a reliance on the ethnographic method to generate cultural knowledge in the s, thus continuing a connection between ethnography and ELT culture theory that was established earlier in the s scholarship. In other reviews of the literature, Young et al. Also notable in this literature set is Kramsch's proposal to replace communicative competence with symbolic competence.

In conjunction with the challenge to received definitions of culture, authors in this time call for a re-tooling of culture teaching for emerging areas of ELT that are self-consciously global in scope such as EIL, ELF, and World Englishes Baker, , ; Broady, In these domains, the privileging of traditional BANA cultural models—native speaker and nationalized cultures—is vigorously called into question.

Given the heightened attention to global landscapes, ELT scholars in this period who stay within the comfortable confines of nationalized boundaries appear disjointed from global realities. The goal in the s is an intercultural speaker Risager, ; Roberts et al. Authors in the s recommend a variety of techniques for culture teaching. Dialogues, critical encounters, role-plays, and mediation tasks are still present Paige et al. Other techniques include reading assignments, journals, guest speakers, micro-teaching, and diversity workshops Agudelo, Guest warns against contrastive analysis activities popularly known as cultural incidents because of the danger they pose for perpetuating essentialized views of the Other.

Case studies in this time illustrate effective techniques for intercultural competence Cruz, ; Liddicoat, The appearance of the post-method condition Kumaravadivelu, , has a significant impact on culture teaching, especially in contexts of EIL, English for academic purposes, and English for specific purposes Baker, ; Barletta, ; Nault, The post-method condition also casts teachers as mediators of culture learning rather than sources of cultural knowledge, as had been the arrangement in previous structuralist designs.

What becomes more pronounced in the literature set is the disconnect authors describe between ELT scholarship and the reported practices of in-service language teachers Atay et al. As a result, the teachers resort to static representations of culture and fact-based culture teaching. Authors argue that traditional models of teacher education are not working Bayyurt, and that specific modules for ICC training are necessary Agudelo, ; Paige et al.

Schulz suggests a different tack: Risager notes the increasing need for explicit definitions of key terms so that valid and reliable methods of assessment can be developed. Textbooks for culture learning are also criticized for superficial treatments of cultural groups which are incompatible with poststructuralist visions Bonilla, ; Paige et al. In the literature reviewed from , the notion of culture continues to gain complexity as authors attach additional dimensions to it. A representative sample of a culture definition is found in Kramsch's articulation written for a global audience of intercultural education scholars:.

On top of these existing threads, Kramsch's definition introduces additional defining characteristics: The small set of s literature reveals three general themes. The first is continued work on viable alternatives to culture as a unit of analysis. Atkinson and Sohn note the challenge in ELT to describe cultural practices when traditional terms are discredited, and propose a compromise approach termed cultural studies of the person.

Nationalized cultures and essentialized cultures are increasingly problematized Baker, ; Kramsch, A second theme is the continued re-framing of culture in ways consistent with the global realities of ELT. It is no longer a question if one should lead the other. Instead, it has become a question of whether or not they can be separated for teaching purposes. Hall, , Sybing, Still, scholars in this set continue to refine their conceptualizations of what culture teaching should look like under an intercultural orientation. For example, Liddicoat and Scarino propose the intercultural perspective which places the focus on the language learner as both producer and interpreter of meaning in intercultural situations.

Additional framing concepts bring pedagogical attention to intercultural education as a self-consciously inclusionary practice. These include critical cosmopolitanism Holliday, and intercultural awareness Baker, Hall acknowledge that although there are multiple conceptual models, there is little empirical evidence that they are effective, a criticism raised previously during the s.

Other scholars in this set examine intercultural education as expressed in language policy documents. Liddicoat , for example, demonstrates how policy texts reflect ideological understandings of the intercultural individual and thus project particular kinds of intercultural relationships for language teaching practice. In particular, Liddicoat's analysis shows how language-in-education policy can contribute to maintaining hegemonic conditions between groups in the particular intercultural identities that a policy affords—the privileged versus the marginalized p.

Goals for culture teaching in the s literature set follow along at least two pathways. A second pathway is critical pedagogy. Scholars in the s data set suggest a number of classroom techniques and activities that are consistent with the complex image of culture that has emerged.

Scholars in this set communicate concerns with the practical implementation of culture teaching in language classrooms. Given the findings presented above, what are some general developments in how scholars approach culture teaching over the course of the years surveyed ? Looking first at the definition of culture, one observes that the concept of culture increases in complexity over time. One may think of a layering process. In the literature sets authors do not necessarily throw out the established concepts about culture from previous generations.

They build on them, layer upon layer, until eventually they arrive at complex, multi-faceted definitions of culture represented in Kramsch By the s set, culture is context-dependent, defined according to diverse subjectivities, mobile, and ever-changing. A second development observed in the literature is a transition in how scholars locate culture. In earlier writings, culture was something tied to a person.

Over time, however, authors came to describe culture in less-certain terms, locating it in the relationships that emerge when individuals interact in specific contexts. This development could be described as a transition from culture-in-the-person to culture-in-the-context. Regarding the actual practice of culture teaching, treatments also developed over time.

Three observations are possible. The first is that the role of the teacher shifted from being the center of cultural knowledge to the facilitator of knowledge—or more accurately—of intercultural development. Another observation is a movement between culture-specific to culture-general orientations. The culture-general orientation allowed for greater abstraction of teaching content over time. It also facilitated a re-thinking of what the endpoint for culture teaching should be. The term intercultural competence, which began as the ability to avoid cultural pitfalls, came instead to mean the ability to mediate cultural boundaries e.

A third observation is the growing presence of critical theory in how ELT scholars are thinking about culture teaching. Specifically, one identifies sensitivity to power and inclusiveness that is not detectable in the earlier decade sets. At the same time, there are observable consistencies across the literature sets. One is scholar concern with a perceived disconnect between culture teaching in theory and in actual classroom practice. Across the decade sets, we find expressed critique of culture teaching methods, commercially-available materials, assessment techniques, and teacher education programs.

A second observation is that the developments in the literature are not absolute. In each decade set of readings, cultural definitions and culture teaching methodologies, deemed outdated by contemporaries, nevertheless are present. This review has purposively avoided using the term paradigm shift for this reason. Even in the postmodern climate of the current literature, studies that deploy theoretical concepts and teaching methods of previous decades are not difficult to find.

Both Oxford and Young, Sachdev, and Seedhouse attribute the analogy to the anthropological work of Edward T. An intercultural approach for language teaching: Developing critical cultural awareness. The ties that bind pp. The question of culture: EFL teaching in non-Englishspeaking countries. ELT Journal, 38 1 , Developing the intercultural perspective in foreign language teaching in Colombia: A review of six journals. Language and Intercultural Communication, 14 2 , Addressing culture in the EFL classroom: The role of intercultural competence in foreign language teaching.

Inonu University Journal of the Faculty of Education, 10 3 , Why contrastive rhetoric needs a better conceptualization of culture. Towards a critical cultural awareness in the language classroom. HOW, 23 1 , License Deed can be consulted at http: Due to the need of decentering language learners' conceptions and practices of "othering" against the target culture, it has become necessary to help them grow in critical cultural understanding and positive appreciation towards the richness of difference and plurality, as a transversal dimension of their intercultural competence.

Thus, this paper seeks to summarize the literature on the notion of othering and its pedagogical possibilities to promote critical cultural awareness raising in the language classroom. It initially presents some theoretical contributions on the concepts of the "Other" and the "Self" and its dialectical relation, and later, it proposes four pedagogical tools that could enable learners to achieve the already mentioned objective.

Critical cultural awareness, language learning, othering, pedagogical tools, the Other and the Self. With an increasingly interconnected world and constant flux of information going back and forth, borders have been widely opened for human beings to venture into new horizons and experiences where an encounter with the Other is unavoidable. During the past years governments, international organizations, educational institutions, among other actors, have reaffirmed the need to encourage an active participation and democratic citizenship that resists all forms of prejudice, discrimination, inequality, and human rights abuses.

Therefore, universal core values such as responsibility, respect, tolerance, freedom, unity, compassion, and fairness Kidder as cited in Meacham, have been considered key elements everyone must possess in order to cultivate mutual understandings and cross-cultural dialogues. Within this context, classrooms become "culturally sensitive places to learn" Porto, , p. Only in this way is it possible to break down their barriers of incomprehension, ignorance, and alienation that take them to misleading pictures of the Other. Therefore, the present paper seeks to explore how the notion of othering may contribute to the critical cultural awareness raising in the language classroom.

It first introduces a discussion from several theoretical perspectives on the concepts of "Other", the "Self", and "Othering," and then displays some pedagogical tools teachers can use to achieve this intended objective. When writing this document, the author conducted an overall literature review by consulting updated and reliable information from books, journals, research articles, scientific databases, and thesis repositories which subsequently led to a corpus compilation of around 85 bibliographic references.

These sources were localized by establishing conceptual categories such as "intercultural communicative competence," "critical cultural awareness," "othering," "ethnocentrism," "essentialism," and so forth. Then, it was necessary to sort, evaluate, and analyze them to find the possible connections among the different works and to identify landmarks, concepts, and theorists that provided a framework.

The Concern of "Othering": From Philosophy to the Language Class. A binary of "Us" and "Them" socially constructed on the perceptions typically negative of any social identity e. This subject has been a core issue in the agendas of numerous theoretical traditions, dating from Plato's The Sophist , which approached the ontological question of Being and Not-Being.

Down through the years, academics have become more interested in the discussion of the "alterity of the other," the way human beings shape themselves as subjects through their relations with others. Some reference points that address these notions can be observed in the works of philosophers like Hegel , who first introduced the concept of the Other, later adopted by continental philosophy as a theory framework.

He claimed that for the subject to become an intentional and self-conscious agent, he or she needs to be constructed by the recognition of the Other. That is to say, the essential characteristic of the individual's awareness involves the connection between the Self and the Other as a necessary condition of the Self as being, an assumption known as the phenomenon of intersubjectivity. This sense of supplementation and completeness between selves became a shared interest within some contemporary philosophers like Husserl , who argued that "the other is a 'mirroring' of my own self and yet not a mirroring proper, an analogue of my own self and yet again not an analogue in the usual sense" Husserl, , p.

This statement led him to recognize the Other in its form as ego, in its form of alterity but not as an alter-ego, which results in its reduction to the sameness Derrida, Moreover, this idea of the Other is directly related to the theoretical framework of intersubjectivity that involves experimenting empathy when putting oneself into the other's shoes. In the same line of thought, Heidegger stated that "by 'Others,' we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the 'I' stands out. They are rather those from whom.

This means that the Other "cannot be approached by the context of "egohood" that is, as alter-ego " Raffoul, , p.

Meta-Cultural Pedagogy

According to Little , Levinas claimed that Western philosophy has overshadowed the Other above the Self and, for that reason, he suggested ethics as a solution to overcome an individuals' autonomous freedom and account for the Other, because face-to-face encounters increase their ethical subjectivity. Likewise, Lacan , making use of his psychoanalytic theory, approached the notion of alterity by affirming that there are two different types of "other". The first one, the little "other" or the counterpart autre , arises from the Mirror Stage theory and refers to the resemblance of the ego from the imaginary realm, but it also symbolizes the individuals' recognition of other real people outside themselves, alter-egos with whom they identify and recognize themselves Bailly, ; Lehman, On the other hand, the second "other" is associated with the language symbolic order the foundation of intersubjectivity for him and denotes an "Absolute Other" Autre , a qua absolute alterity that surpasses the labels of "us and them" Perniola, ; Seshadri, It allows infants to be aware that they are separate subjects from "their mirror images," from "their others," and for them to start developing an own identity by means of the language use.

Therefore, language becomes an instrument provided by the Other l'Autre du language to build the notion of "Self" but also to communicate with other individuals mediated by exchanges of meanings loaded with diverse and probably, new social identities. Derrida , for his part, conceived the "the other" written in lower-case letter as a combination of the absolute other and the alter-ego Saghafi, , rejecting Levinas' radical separation of the other from the same.

He argued that alterity is relational because the Other "is an ego. This interplay of the Other and the Self either as its constituent element or its radical alterity, as described above, has managed to extend its discussions to the historically marginalized discourses of post-colonialism, feminism, multiculturalism, and gender, among others, as direct responses of the embedded social practices of exclusion, domination, and denial of the Other. Hence, from this neglected alterity that during Modernism approached the Other by its differences and led to alienation and hostility, the notion of "Othering" made more sense and was appropriated by postmodernism proponents like Bhabha , Said , Spivak , and others.

Scholars whose postcolonial theory reflected on the subjective experiences and realities that perpetuate silencing practices, reinforce hegemonic and hierarchical power dynamics as well as oppression on particular groups of people. Thus, the Other with capital letter represents the focus of power, the Colonizer, meanwhile the other with lower-case letter symbolizes the colonized inferior others, the subalterns in Gramsci's words On the other hand, Said addressed the issue of othering by referring to how Europe has built Orient and its identity in an exoticized, reductionist and alienating fashion.

To illustrate, Bhabha affirmed that the use of racial stereotyping, for example, has validated the conquest process and institutionalized systems of imperial administration and instruction over the inferiors and degenerated others. Stereotypes become, then, derogatory and aggressive discourse devices that fix divisions between the colonizers and colonized, between the "Self and the other.

From this never-ending concern, academics of the postcolonial theory claim that it is only possible to overcome the hegemonic supremacy of the Self and thus, recognize the Others in their diversity by providing them with a place to speak back from their personal experiences and reality, so that they can demonstrate how they have been "othered" by the imperialist ideals. We could continue providing theoretical contributions on this topic from the several philosophical, anthropological, sociological, psychological, psychoanalytical, and cultural perspectives; however, as the aforementioned have already displayed an overview of the dialectical relations between the "Self" and the "Other," it is time now to tackle it from the educational setting, more specifically, from the language teaching and learning classroom.

Students are commonly exposed to experiences of mutual encounters and confrontations with a foreign language and culture in which they reshape or reinforce their socially built beliefs, values, and behaviors against the Other. Within this context, the hidden curriculum to which Byram refers unveils people's difficulty in overcoming strong elitist emotions and the sense of buttressing the Self over the naturalized Other. They observed that five Muslim Saudi Arabian students experienced being othered as a result of the Islamophobic discourses present in their learning community.

Learners felt that their identities were racialized by their own teachers and partners due to barriers related to nationality, ethnicity, and religion. Hence, they were regarded as people who have limited knowledge, who like cheating on exams, are lazy, promiscuous, and prone to be terrorists, preconceptions resulting from the several incidents students had to face, which led them to recognize themselves as being placed in a marginalized and inferior social position. Something similar was perceived by Palfreyman , whose research project in a Turkish university indicated that administrators and native-English-speaking teachers othered their nonnative-English-speaking colleagues and students owing to the socially constructed representations of difference among themselves.

Thus, socioeconomic class, gender, national identity, and power relationships, among other factors, shaped their attitudes, perceptions, social roles, and approaches to TESOL and consequently, perpetuated a discourse of othering in which Westerners were regarded as rational or normal, whereas Turks were seen as strangers. In the same vein, Ahmadi's study in an ESOL college, located in the Arabian Gulf, showed that there was an English linguistic imperialism on Qatari students, who were stereotyped and marginalized by their own instructors due to their sociocultural particularities i.

Learners were constantly labeled as "lazy," "spoiled," and "arrogant" as a consequence of their teachers' sense of discomfort with their mother tongue and misunderstanding of cultural differences. This situation gave way to the phenomenon of othering , which resulted in increasing students' affective filter and their unwillingness to have formal learning experiences, as it was difficult for them to deal with their low self-esteem as well as to do well at college. It is noteworthy that othering is also implicit within the body of literature that permeates the language teaching and learning field.

They asserted that theorists tend to create taken-forgranted, essentialized cultural labels grounded on dichotomies between the East and the West, which could be accurate in some ways but negative in others. Kubota, for example, states that the Japanese are commonly represented as having a harmonic, deep thinking, and group culture; however, Susser observes that a sense of prejudice and hostility also arises from this representation, as they are posited as an Other different and inferior from Westerners.

Clearly, these discourses of power, hierarchy, and marginalization are symptoms of vertical power relationships in which the whole educational community i. However, it should not be forgotten that the "classroom" is not itself a four wall space but an extension of the sociocultural realities of society where people from different "multicultural mosaics" Kumaravadivelu, are more likely to be othered.

An example of this was registered by Bergman , whose study revealed that non-native English speakers could feel discriminated against for not having an American-like accent when communicating and involving themselves within the community. Findings indicated that a group of four adult foreign language speakers from India, Bosnia, Brazil, and Ethiopia experienced a feeling of frustration, shame, insecurity, and annoyance caused by people treating them different because of their "unnatural accent. The radiograph displayed by these empirical examples constitutes a sign of the widespread othering experiences reproduced by the ethnocentric views of the Self.

Therefore, with the same concern felt by philosophers, education cannot be alien to the call from postcolonial scholars to establish a place where subalterns can speak and engage in some other approaches undertaken by the different disciplines in regard to this matter.

Othering: Towards a Critical Cultural Awareness in the Language Classroom

According to Guilherme , education has focused on working on the micro levels of society, that is, educational institutions where cultural awareness and citizenship can be promoted; specifically, the language-learning classroom plays an important cultural and political role to dehumanize alienating power structures. As a result, othering has been increasingly gaining the attention within the framework of language learning by progressively overcoming the traditional, simplistic, and uncritical teaching approaches that mainly emphasize high culture Heusinkveld, ; Kumaravadivelu, ; Peck, In this respect, Houghton claims that teachers should be careful not to transmit a "static, fragmented and incomplete picture of culture, taught as if it was something out there to be learned as a set of facts [since it] only provides learners with a decontextualized, stereotype and misleading [idea of how the Other is]" p.

Thereby, if this essentialism wants to be disrupted, it is compulsory to encourage a relativizing and reflective cultural view that promotes the development of a critical cultural awareness as a key component of the intercultural communicative competence. Authors such as Byram , ; Tomlinson ; Tomlinson and Masuhara ; Kumaravadivelu ; Houghton have agreed that to increase the knowledge, understanding, and collaboration towards the Other, learners should be offered chances to negotiate meanings with other cultures and critically evaluate their points of view, practices, and products as well as to reflect upon their own.

Within this context, both language students and teachers are expected to become "critical citizens of the world" Byram, , p. Therefore, the idea is to get to a neutralizing zone in the classroom, a "third space," "third domain," or "in-between space" Bhabha, ; Feng, ; Kostogriz, ; Kramsch, in which the Other makes present and binary oppositions unmasked, challenged, and criticized to gain awareness of the richness that implies multiple subjectivities and hybridity. Critical pedagogy thinkers also advocate for this same goal as they argue that students must be engaged to create discourses of respect for plurality, freedom, and social justice.

For example, Freire holds that when human beings identify their own ethnocentric stance and are aware of the motives behind their othering attitudes and practices, they become active agents who can transform their reality. Likewise, Giroux advocates for "the ability to think and act critically," p.

As Byram as cited in Guilherme, argues, being a critical cultural individual means going "beyond [the] understanding and interpretation of difference and intercultural relations into commitment and action" p. However, this is not an aim that happens overnight since it implies exposure to intercultural encounters that stimulate self-reflection Bennett; Hall; as cited in Houghton, and the development of new viewpoints and insights to recognize where we are positioned and what representations we are making of the Other.

Therefore, the next section will display some suggestions of pedagogical tools that can enable language students to gain greater understanding of others while strengthening their critical cultural awareness. Learning from experience and discovery has been one of the most successful teaching approaches used for encouraging an open-minded attitude and interest about the richness of the target culture Kramsch, , The goal is to help learners perceive through the language classes how real-world issues perpetuate othering and how it influences them, so that they can reconstruct its context of production while exploring their own culturallyshaped knowledge e.

Hence, educators' biggest challenge is to connect citizenship education with language teaching processes Council of Europe, , by acting as mediators and " inter cultural ambassadors" Houghton, , p. Some illustrative examples of this can be evidenced in the following four pedagogical tools:. First, there are the cultural products such as literary and non-literary texts, media channels, national symbols, etc. Its integration into the classroom setting leads students to critically perceive, deconstruct, and understand their own taken-for-granted assumptions as well as the social marginalized discourses of colonialism, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, etc.

Empirical demonstrations on this can be found in Starkey's as cited in Dasli, teaching practice, who proposed that pupils conduct a critical discourse analysis on a newspaper article about immigration by studying the linguistic and stylistic features that represent narratives of racism, to later compare it with an Irish press and write down their feelings and reflections about their findings. Similarly, Gay and Kirkland encouraged students to examine and reconstruct major North American icons and celebrations e. For her part, Knight , an English teacher of a multicultural Australian secondary school, demonstrated how through the creation of a Unit of work her learners were sensitized on the different forms of othering.

She intended to connect the curriculum with her students' realities by integrating a variety of input e. As a final part of the Unit, she planned a summative task in which learners put into practice what they have learnt by producing narratives, scripts, brochures, posters, and PowerPoint presentations. Hence, conducting interviews and observations to unveil silenced realities empowers learners to become active agents able to use the acquired knowledge to reframe learning and participate in action-oriented projects Bloome, In this regard, Bateman's study showed that encouraging students to apply ethnographic interviews as a strategy of cultural learning results in enhancing their positive attitudes towards the target culture, increasing their competencies in approaching and communicating with people from different cultural backgrounds as well as decentralizing themselves to observe situations from different cultural standpoints.

Likewise, critical cultural incidents can be used tomake learners face cultural differences as well as to unmask unjust power relations against the Other. They are commonly presented in the form of dialogues or description of scenarios that depict people's emotional states and reactions when facing culture shock, miscommunication, or cross-cultural misunderstandings Lebedko, ; Reimann, According to Apedaile and Schill , these incidents become "tools for increasing our awareness and understanding of human attitudes, expectations, behaviors, and interactions" p.

Byram and Zarate argue that the language teacher can approach students to recognize and reflect upon some cultural misunderstandings that, for example, arise from embarrassing moments when behaviors and customs have opposite meanings i. Therefore, they advise helping learners anticipate the possible unfamiliar experiences they might encounter if living in a different physical and social reality, so that rejection and negative attitudes towards the target culture can be avoided.

Finally, a traditional tool most educators take into account when dealing with cultural teaching and othering is the roleplay or simulation. Kodotchigova , Tomalin and Stempleski , and Tran state that reenacting or dramatizing a cultural conflict or incident as realistic anecdotes allows learners to examine their own perceptions, cultural behaviors, and communication patterns by positing themselves in the shoes of another to be emotionally involved in cross-cultural relationships and dialogues.

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In this respect, Coultas, Grossman, and Salas argue that role play leads to an enculturation process in which students are aware of their own culture when reflecting upon their biases, prejudices, and norms; but it also promotes acculturation, as they become conscious of other cultures. An example of this can be observed in Ghadiri's, Tavakoli's, and Ketabi's work, who made use, among other teaching techniques, of simulations to prevent possible intercultural conflicts among Iranian learners and, thus, enhance their critical cultural awareness by conveying a more detailed knowledge and appreciation for difference.

This made part of a culturally-adaptive foreign language syllabus they designed in which learning activities revolved around topics such as ethnic diversity, dominant attitudes, relationships, verbal interaction, and some others. Similarly, if the goal is to develop the idea of being explained by others, that is, to have learners experience what it feels to be in the periphery and to be othered Holliday, ; role-plays become the most suitable pedagogical tool for this purpose. Thus, this is what Hughes-Tafen found when her Appalachian learners reviewed and performed four plays representing how the ideas of whiteness and Americanness become cultural barriers to critically reflect on the othering experiences lived by South Black women from the northern hemisphere.

She indicated that drama is a useful tool to deal with othering discourses, since, as Kramsch and Holliday hold, students have the chance to detach themselves from their own texts and place as onlookers able to negotiate and appreciate different cultural views. Ultimately, it can be concluded from the above that by recognizing the potential of approaching learners to live and experience new and different cultural repertories, there are greater chances for them to "become a little bit of 'other'" Robinson, , p.

This in the beginning might create moments of conflict, discordance, and contradiction in students; however, if correctly directed within the classroom setting, the encounter with the Other could represent opportunities for reaching a consensus, action, and transformation of the destructive ethnocentric discourses still prevailing in society Freire, ; Guilherme, ; Kramsch, , ; Leitner, ; Wernicke, n.

Othering manifestations are permanently reproduced, reinforced, and experienced by people all around the world, regardless of their race, language, gender, class, nationality, or religion. They imply an interplay of socially constructed and reconstructed subjectivities of the "Self" and the "Other" that continuously struggle for power, resistance, and agency over legitimized discourses of belongingness and strangeness.

However, as mentioned throughout this paper, it cannot be denied that this dichotomy goes beyond difference, as the "Self" would not have been possible without the complement of a significant "Other," with whom individuals interact and build themselves. Hence, instead of perpetuating othering narratives that lead to misconceptions and prejudices, the aim should be promoting feelings of "oneness" that cultivate mutual recognition, appreciation, respect, collaboration, and intercultural exchanges among people. In this constructive exercise of breaking down unjust binary oppositions as well as disrupting biased and incomplete representations of othering, classrooms have been regarded as the most appropriate in-between spaces for this task.

Especially, language classrooms constitute perfect sites to provide new educational and cultural opportunities for students to empower themselves and learn how to critically read, interpret, reflect, evaluate, and reinterpret new meanings of the Other's social identity. In this sense, pedagogical tools such as cultural products , critical cultural incidents , qualitative research methods , and role-plays serve as engaging instruments to make students cross-culturally aware and avoid reductionist and essentialist cultural visions, this by letting them experience a diversity of perspectives and realities embedded within the culture of the target language.

The purpose then is to bring society to the classroom setting for pupils to face it and learn first-hand how to negotiate othering manifestations and seek further understandings on its context of production and reproduction. In this way, as global citizens, they are encouraged to feel curiosity, recognition, and empathy for the difference while progressively multiplying their learnings to macro social scenarios, even though in the beginning they will be loaded with a certain degree of othering, as it is unavoidable to feel strangeness with people and cultures they have not been directly involved with before.

However, the aim is not only to seek recognition, respect, and a critical stand towards the target culture but also to be aware of the social multiplicities found within one's own culture since, for example, living in the same country or region does not mean that everybody believes, thinks, and acts in the same way one does. Finally, it is worth mentioning that learners are not the only beneficiaries from taking othering as an opportunity for awareness-raising; teachers as well gain rich insight on how to critically treat and handle the "target culture," so that they avoid cultural relativism and instead, promote humanizing learnings that resist the different othering processes.

Therefore, further research should be done specifically in this regard, since most literature is mainly based on the students' perspectives and takes for granted that educators already know how to approach culture teaching. A path for critical cultural awareness-raising in a sample of English practitioners at La Gran Colombia University.

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Othering in the EFL classroom: An action research study. International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies, 1 4 , Critical incidents for intercultural communication: