The Nature of Culture and its Role in a Foreign Language Program

Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902 – May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. (wikipedia)

What is a culture?

The single greatest contributor, and practitioner, of structural functionalism was Talcott Parsons (1902-1979). The heart of Parsons's theory is built on the four functional imperatives, also known as the AGIL system:

1. The adaptive function, whereby a system adapts to its environment.
2. The goal-attainment function, i.e., how a system defines and achieves its goals.
3. The integrative function, or the regulation of the components of the system.
4. Latency, or pattern maintenance function, i.e., how motivation and the dimensions of culture that create and sustain motivation are stimulated.

Complementing this are four action systems, each of which serve a functional imperative: the behavioral organism performs the adaptive function; the personality system performs goal attainment; the social system performs the integrative function; and the cultural system performs pattern maintenance. Parsons saw these action systems acting at different levels of analysis, starting with the behavioral organism and building to the cultural system. He saw these levels hierarchically, with each of the lower levels providing the impetus for the higher levels, with the higher levels controlling the lower levels.
Parsons was concerned primarily with the creation of social order, and he investigated it using his theory based on a number of assumptions, primarily that systems are interdependent; they tend towards equilibrium; they may be either static or involved in change; that allocation and integration are particularly important to systems in any particular point of equilibrium; and that systems are self-maintaining. These assumptions led him to focus primarily on order but to overlook, for the most part, the issue of change.
The basic unit of Parsons's social system is the status-role complex. Actors are seen as a collection of statuses and roles relatively devoid of thought. Parsons's interest was in the large-scale components of social systems, such as collectivities, norms, and values. Parsons also thought that social systems had a number of functional prerequisites, such as compatibility with other systems, fulfillment of the needs of actors, support from other systems, inducing adequate levels of participation from its members, controlling deviance, controlling conflict, and language.
Parsons was particularly interested in the role of norms and values. He focused on the socialization process, whereby society instills within individuals an outlook in which it is possible for them to pursue their own self-interest while still serving the interests of the system as a whole. It was through socialization that Parsons believed that actors internalized the norms of society. Physical or coercive systems of control were seen as only a secondary line of defense.
The cultural system is at the very pinnacle of action systems. For instance, Parsons believed that culture had the capability of becoming a part of other systems, such as norms and values in the social system. Culture is defined as a patterned, ordered system of symbols that are objects of orientation to actors, internalized aspects of the personality system, and institutionalized patterns. The symbolic nature of culture allows it to control other action systems.
The personality system generates personality, defined as the organized orientation and motivation of action in the individual actor, built by need-dispositions and shaped by the social setting. Again Parsons presents a passive view of actors.
In order to deal with change, Parsons turned to a form of evolutionary theory, focusing on differentiation and adaptive upgrading. He suggested three evolutionary stages: primitive, intermediate, and modern. This perspective suffers from a number of flaws, primarily because it sees change as generally positive and does not deal with the process of change, but rather points of equilibrium across periods of change.
One way that Parsons does inject a real sense of dynamism into his theory is with the concept of the generalized media of interchange. Although this concept is somewhat ambiguous, it can be thought of as resources, particularly symbolic resources, for which there is a universal desire (e.g., money, influence, or political power). The suggestion that individuals might act to influence the social distribution of such resources (as media entrepreneurs) adds dynamism to what is often seen as a static theory. (http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072817186/student_view0/chapter7/chapter_summary.html)

The Importance of Teaching Culture to Foreign Language Program

 

Foreign language learning is comprised of  several components including grammatical competence, language proficiency, as well as a change in attitude towards one's own or another culture for the

conventions,customs,beliefs, and systems of meaning of another country, is indisputably

an integral part of foreign language learning, and many teachers have seen it as their goal to incorporate the teaching of culture into the foreign language curriculum. 

It could be maintained that the notion of communicative competence, which, in the past decade or so, has blazed a trail, so to
speak, in foreign language teaching, emphasizing the role of context and the
circumstances under which language can be used accurately and appropriately, ‘fall[s]
short of the mark when it comes to actually equipping students with the cognitive skills
they need in a second-culture environment’ (Straub, 1999: 2)

In other words, since the wider context of language, that is, society and culture, has been reduced to a variable elusive of any definition—as many teachers and students incessantly talk about it without knowing what its exact meaning is—it stands to reason that the term communicative competence should become nothing more than an empty and
meretricious word, resorted to if for no other reason than to make an “educational
point.” In reality, what most teachers and students seem to lose sight of is the fact that
‘knowledge of the grammatical system of a language [grammatical competence] has to
be complemented by understanding (sic) of culture-specific meanings [communicative or
rather cultural competence]’ (Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 4).

Of course, we are long past an era when first language acquisition and second or foreign
language learning were cast in a “behaviouristic mould,” being the products of imitation and language “drills,” and language was thought of as a compendium of rules and
strings of words and sentences used to form propositions about a state of affairs. In the
last two decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of language in relation to society, which has led to a shift of focus from behaviourism and positivism to
constructivism to critical theory (see Benson & Voller, 1997: 19-25). Yet, there are still some deeply ingrained beliefs as to the nature of language learning and teaching—beliefs that determine methodology as well as the content of the foreign language curriculum—which have, gradually and insidiously, contrived to undermine the teaching of culture.

 One of the misconceptions that have permeated foreign language teaching is the
conviction that language is merely a code and, once mastered—mainly by dint of
steeping oneself into grammatical rules and some aspects of the social context in which
it is embedded—‘one language is essentially (albeit not easily) translatable into another’
(Kramsch, 1993: 1). To a certain extent, this belief has been instrumental in promoting
various approaches to foreign language teaching—pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and
communicative—which have certainly endowed the study of language with a social
“hue”; nevertheless, paying lip service to the social dynamics that under grid language
without trying to identify and gain insights into the very fabric of society and culture
that have come to charge language in many and varied ways can only cause
misunderstanding and lead to cross-cultural miscommunication. Example:

At a dry cleaner, there is an ads. It says: "Drop your trousers here for the best results.

What do you think about this ads? It doesn't mean that you have to put off your trousers at that time then give to the dry cleaners. But it means you can dry your clothes there and get the best results.

 At any rate, foreign language learning is foreign culture learning, and, in one form or
another, culture has, even implicitly, been taught in the foreign language classroom—if
for different reasons. What is debatable, though, is what is meant by the term “culture”
and how the latter is integrated into language learning and teaching. Kramsch’s keen
observation should not go unnoticed:

Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on,so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing It is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative  competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them. (Kramsch, 1993: 1) 

What are the goals of cultural teaching?  

The teaching of culture is not akin to the transmission of information regarding the
people of the target community or country—even though knowledge about (let alone experience of) the “target group” is an important ingredient (see Nostrand, 1967: 118). It would be nothing short of ludicrous to assert that culture is merely a repository of facts and experiences to which one can have recourse, if need be. Furthermore, what Kramsch herself seems to insinuate is that to learn a foreign language is not merely to learn how to communicate but also to discover how much leeway the target language allows
learners to manipulate grammatical forms, sounds, and meanings, and to reflect upon, or
even flout, socially accepted norms at work both in their own or the target culture.

The role of cultural learning in the foreign language classroom has been the concern of many teachers and scholars and has sparked considerable controversy, yet its validity as an equal complement to language learning has often been overlooked or even impugned. Up to now, two main perspectives have influenced the teaching of culture. One pertains to the transmission of factual, cultural information,
which consists in statistical information, that is, institutional structures and other aspects
of the target civilisation, highbrow information, i.e., immersion in literature and the arts,
and lowbrow information, which may focus on the customs, habits, and folklore of
everyday life (see Kramsch, 1993: 24). This preoccupation with facts rather than
meanings, though, leaves much to be desired as far as an understanding of foreign attitudes and values is concerned, and virtually blindfolds learners to the minute albeit  significant aspects of their own as well as the target group’s identity that are not easily divined and appropriated.