Teaching Culture

In the current curriculas for the A and B course in English in the Swedish Upper Secondary School it says that the students should have knowledge about conditions of society, history, culture and cultural traditions and ways of living in areas where English is spoken. This is something that I have been thinking quite a lot about. Exactly what is it that should be brought up in class? Which English speaking areas should be chosen? I think many teachers, including me, tend to focus on countries like Britain, the USA, Australia, well you get the picture. But then there are all the other areas where English is an official language and this makes the culture part of the curriculas huge and very much up to the teacher.

In Tornberg, chapter 4, one can then read that when you in language teaching talk about culture this has often been associated with nationality and that has meant that the culture of the country has been studied. But what is culture and is culture homogeneous and never changing and whose culture are we talking about? Culture is not only about ethnicity because we are all part of different cultures. If you consider this, can we really teach about culture? And if we try to teach about the culture in a particlar country aren't we actually generalising a bit too much?

At the same time we need, according to Brown (p.238) to teach our students about kinesic communication and this is part of the culture in a country. The way we use different gestures differ from country to country and a gesture that is appropriate in one country is perhaps obscene in another.That is why the students need to learn something about this as a part of their communication competence.

So we need to teach about culture to improve the communication competence but culture as such can't really be taught, according to Tornberg anyway, and I tend to agree. So what can we teach then, well perhaps only pure facts?

How do the rest of you deal with this in your courses?