Cultural Studies: Exploring Cultural Phenomena for Language Learning

Cultural studies, in the context of language learning, means treating a culture’s products and phenomena — its literature, film, history, art, music and everyday life — as content to be studied alongside the language itself. This is the tradition that German curricula call Landeskunde, French ones civilisation, and English-language teaching often just “area studies” or “the cultural component”: the part of a course that asks not how the language works but what world it opens onto. It is distinct from cultural awareness, which is the competence and stance a learner brings to communication across a cultural boundary. Cultural studies is about the material — the novel, the film, the historical fact; cultural awareness is about the sensitivity — knowing when a request is too blunt or a topic taboo. The two are complementary: studying a culture’s products feeds the awareness that guides its speech.

(The name also belongs to an academic discipline — the critical study of media, power and popular culture founded at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. That field shares a name and an interest in how meaning is made, but the language classroom borrows only its object, culture, not its critical apparatus. What follows is about culture as the content of language learning.)

Big-C Culture and little-c culture

The most useful first distinction is between two senses of the word. Big-C Culture — sometimes “achievement” or “capital-C” Culture — is the visible, prestigious output of a society: its literature and philosophy, its art and architecture, its history, its landmark films and composers. This is culture as civilization, the material a traditional syllabus meant when it appended “French civilization” to a grammar course. little-c culture — “behavioural” or everyday culture — is the vast, mostly invisible fabric of ordinary life: how people greet and eat, what they do at the weekend, how they queue, joke, apologize and mark time. The distinction was popularized in language education by Claire Kramsch, who insisted that the everyday sense is not the poor relation of the prestigious one but often the more important for a learner, because it is where the language actually lives.

Gary Weaver’s iceberg model (1986), building on Edward T. Hall, captures why this matters. Above the waterline sits surface culture — food, festivals, flags, fashion, famous figures, the “five F’s” a tourist meets first. Below it lies deep culture — the values, assumptions and unspoken rules that produce the visible behaviour and are never stated because insiders take them for granted. A course that stops at the tip teaches the folklore and misses the drivers; the whole point of studying a culture seriously is to get below the waterline, to understand why the visible things take the form they do.

The framework that ties the two together, adopted by the American Standards for Foreign Language Learning (1996), is the three P’s: products (what a culture makes — books, tools, food, laws, monuments), practices (what it does — patterns of behaviour and interaction) and perspectives (what it believes — the values and ideas that give products and practices their meaning). The goal is not to collect products and practices as trivia but to read them back to the perspectives that underlie them: the film and the festival are evidence, and understanding is the reconstruction of the worldview behind them.

Culture as content: literature, film, history

Why bring culture into a language course at all, rather than sticking to vocabulary and grammar? The classic answer, argued most forcefully by Claire Kramsch in Context and Culture in Language Teaching (1993), is that language and culture are inseparable — words carry the freight of the society that uses them, and a learner who knows the dictionary meaning of a word but not its cultural resonance knows only half of it. Culture was long treated as a “fifth skill,” tacked on after reading, writing, listening and speaking; Kramsch and others argued it is woven through all four.

In practice the content comes from a culture’s products, used as windows onto its perspectives:

• Literature — short stories, poems and novels give language in its richest, most patterned form and carry values, history and humour that a textbook dialogue cannot; studies of literature-based instruction consistently find learners who read culturally rich texts outperform those fed neutral material, provided the texts are within reach.
• Film and media — cinema, television and news show language in motion, with the gestures, registers and settings that print omits, and compress a great deal of little-c culture into a watchable form.
• History and institutions — the events, symbols and social arrangements that a culture’s members treat as common knowledge, and without which their jokes, headlines and allusions are opaque.
• Realia — the everyday objects and texts of a culture: menus, tickets, forms, advertisements, songs, packaging. Small, cheap and dense with cultural information, they are the workhorses of the cultural component.

Authentic materials

The preferred vehicle for cultural content is authentic materials: texts, recordings and objects produced by and for members of the target culture, not written to teach the language. A real newspaper article, a pop song, a film clip, a café menu, a literary passage — each brings the language as it is actually used and the culture as it actually presents itself, rather than the sanitized, grammar-driven prose of a coursebook. Authentic materials are motivating precisely because they are real, and they expose the learner to the registers, idioms and cultural references that textbooks smooth away.

The debate around them is about authenticity itself. A menu handed to a learner in a classroom is no longer doing the job it was made for, so some argue that authenticity lies less in the text than in the task — in whether the learner engages with it as its original users would. There is also a difficulty question: raw authentic material can overwhelm a beginner, which is why it is graded, excerpted and scaffolded rather than dropped in whole. The principle survives the caveats: the closer the material is to the real cultural artifact, the more culture travels with the language.

From “facts about a country” to understanding

The oldest and most persistent failure mode of the cultural component is to reduce it to a list of facts — capital cities, national dishes, festivals and famous names — delivered as information to be memorized. This is the “five F’s” approach (food, festivals, folklore, fashion, famous people), and its problem is not that the facts are wrong but that they stay at the tip of the iceberg and, worse, harden into stereotype: “the French eat snails,” “Germans are punctual.” A catalogue of tourist facts can leave a learner more confident in their clichés than before.

The corrective, running through modern work on culture in language teaching, is to shift from transmission to interpretation. Culture is not a body of facts to be learned but a set of phenomena to be read — the aim is to reconstruct the perspectives behind the products and practices, to compare them with one’s own, and to arrive at understanding and empathy rather than a checklist. This is where Michael Byram’s work connects cultural studies to cultural awareness: the content is studied not as an end in itself but to build the capacity to interpret and relate across cultures. It also demands a critical eye, especially with film and popular media, whose framings carry ideology as well as information; the goal is engaged analysis, not passive consumption. Studying a culture well means moving from “facts about a country” to a feel for how its members see the world.

What this means for language learning

Culture is not decoration on a language course; it is part of what the language is. In the framework behind communicative language teaching, using a language appropriately is inseparable from knowing the world it belongs to, and the cultural component is what supplies that world. The practical lesson is not to memorize facts about a country but to meet its culture in the authentic materials where language and culture arrive together — a song, a film scene, a short story, a real headline — and to read them for the perspectives underneath. The most efficient way to make that content stick is the same insight that runs through the study of language itself: capture the useful phrases, allusions and whole sentences the material gives you, and consolidate them through active recall and spaced repetition, which is how the Taalhammer method turns cultural exposure into language you can actually use. For the complementary side — the competence and stance a learner brings to communication across a cultural boundary — see the companion entry on cultural awareness.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between cultural studies and cultural awareness in language learning?

Cultural studies is about content — studying a culture’s products and phenomena (literature, film, history, everyday life) as material in a language course. Cultural awareness is about competence — the sensitivity and stance that lets a learner communicate appropriately across a cultural boundary, choosing the right register and avoiding pragmatic missteps. You study the culture (cultural studies) in part to build the awareness (cultural awareness); the first feeds the second.

What is the difference between Big-C Culture and little-c culture?

Big-C Culture is the prestigious, visible output of a society — its literature, art, history and landmark achievements. little-c culture is the everyday fabric of ordinary life — how people greet, eat, joke, queue and mark time. For a language learner the everyday sense is often the more important, because it is where the language is actually used; a good course covers both and, crucially, reads them back to the values underneath rather than stopping at surface facts.

Do I have to study literature and history to learn a language?

Not formally, but some cultural content makes the language richer and more usable. The point is not to pass an exam in French civilization; it is that words carry the freight of the culture that uses them, and authentic cultural materials — a song, a film clip, a news article, a short story — expose you to language and culture together, in the form real speakers meet them. Use as much or as little as motivates you, and read it for understanding rather than memorizing facts.

Sources

• Claire Kramsch, Context and Culture in Language Teaching, Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Michael Byram, Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education, Multilingual Matters, 1989.
• Patrick R. Moran, Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice, Heinle & Heinle, 2001.
• National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project, Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century, ACTFL, 1996/1999.
• Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976.
• Karen Risager, Language and Culture: Global Flows and Local Complexity, Multilingual Matters, 2006.