What culture? Which culture? Cross-cultural factors in language learning

The ‘cultural background’ in language teaching has, for a number of reasons, recently moved to the foreground: there is renewed interest in subjects as varied as the politics of national language policy, sexism in EFL, and the ideology of textbooks and dictionaries. Broadly speaking, there has been a shift in emphasis in course design from a pre-occupation with form to an interest in content. This article describes the results of a survey designed to elicit the views of students on what language teaching should be about. It tests a number of hypotheses expressed by a variety of writers in previous articles in this journal: the importance or otherwise of 1 bilingual, bicultural teachers; 2 native-speaker models of English; 3 the cultural content of English lessons in a context where English is a foreign rather than a second language.1