Communicative competence aims to develop situational contexts in which the student is exposed to authentic language used in circumstances of the native speakers. The article Towards Intercultural Communicative Competence by Cem Alptekin (2002), questions the validity of communicative competence developing methods through the use of target culture as the context. Canale and Swain’s framework of communicative competence first presented in 1983 is still a very popular and widely accepted model in language teaching today. In Turkey too especially private schools make use of Longman, Pearson or Oxford text books which are laden with texts and listening material based on cultural aspects of the native speakers of English, such as Valentine’s day or Halloween. However, Alptekin, in his article poses several questions as to how inappropriate the target culture is as language teaching tool, especially when considering English, which is the lingua franca of the economic world, international affairs and the internet. Because a large percentage of the world’s non-native speakers use English as the medium of communication, Alptekin claims that native speaker cultural contexts should not be the prerequisite of English language classrooms. I was appalled by how reasonable his supports sounded at first, and fully agreed with his claims. I had read the article for my Assessment and Evaluation’ class, and was intrigued by its perspective. I really wanted to hear what Prof. Mirici thought about the suggestion of using authentic local culture situations to contextualize the use of the target language. In Turkey, today we do have certain online programs or text books prepared having used Nasreddin Hoca, or Temel stories, or an Ramazan setting, or a bayram setting as reading or listening material. In our department at METU, we have recently integrated énisteenglish’, a speaking oriented individualized teaching application where Turkish culture is the medium. There are scenes shot in Antalya, at a ‘kiz isteme’ occasion, at a bakkal, etc. I do believe that Chomkian structural approach to teaching language is not realistic, yet I’m not very decided on developing strategic, discourse and sociolinguistic competence through local contexts. The integration of language and culture may be via both local and target language contexts. Even if students are made aware of the mainstream thinking and behaving ways of English and American cultures, these cultures probably shouldn’t be presented as the ‘target’ o, ‘model’ or the ‘prerequisite’ of learning English. It is very common that even teachers of English are not competent and proficient in English to be able to talk about merely Turkish situations, or even history. So, it might be a good idea to integrate an eclectic content which does not impose target cultural norms on the language learner, but just exposes the student to native speakers’ cultural contexts. At the same time, through supplementary materials, a curriculum could also de-culturize or ‘nativize’ English, as well.
Reference:
Alptekin, C. (2002). Towards Intercultural Communicative Competence. Volume 56/1. Oxford University Press.