Intercultural Learning - Theories On Approaching Culture

Theories On Approaching Culture

In the context of intercultural learning, it is important to be aware of different subcategories of culture, such as "little c" and "big C" culture. While the latter one is also called "objective culture" or "formal culture" referring to institutions, big figures in history, literature, etc., the first one, the "subjective culture", is concerned with the less tangible aspects of a culture, like everyday patterns. In intercultural learning, a mixture of these two is to be employed, but it is especially the apprehension of subjective culture that triggers the development of intercultural competence.
Also, it is important to differentiate between "culture-specific" and "culture-general" approaches when intercultural learning is concerned:

• "culture-specific" approaches mainly aim at the achievement of competence in a particular target culture (C2) and are closely connected to specific language learning (L2). Competence in both C2 and L2 is usually thought to generate culturally appropriate behavior in a particular cultural context.
• "culture-general" approaches, on the other hand, are not targeted on a particular culture. Instead, they are concerned with "universal categories" which function as general characteristics of cultures in general. These categories can be used to make cross-cultural comparisons, for example. Thus, "culture-general" approaches provide a cognitive framework for cultural analysis.

Intercultural learning requires the teacher to employ a mix of "culture-specific" and "culture-general" approaches in order to address the larger issues of ethnocentrism, cultural self-awareness, etc. because intercultural competence cannot be achieved by the single acquisition of knowledge about a specific culture or the pure ability to behave properly in that culture.