SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

8.1 A CULTURAL APPROACH

When I defined the word “culture”( p. Ill), I stated my concern about the
different Connotative possibilities that such a word presents. However, I found Holliday’s
difference between “large” and “small” cultures, very appropriate to refer to the
particular way in which I want to use the word “culture”. Basically I said that my cultural
approach deals with the “small” culture because this term refers to “any cohesive social
grouping” (Holliday, 1997b), as opposed to “large” culture that has ethnic, national or
international connotations.

Reviewing the language education literature on cultural issues, I found that it was
very difficult to make a correlation between my own concept of culture (a small culture
approach) with what has been written. I have the impression that most language
education writers interested in cultural issues are either talking about the target culture
(and the old question about teaching culture when teaching language as in titles such as
“The inevitability of teaching and learning culture in a foreign language course” Valdes,
1990 and other articles in Harrison, 1990), or are dealing with cross-cultural issues (as in
Context and Culture in Language Teaching, Kramsch, 1993), or, following a trend that
has become important in this field, are critically analysing the ideology and hidden
agendas of teaching English in other cultures (the best examples of this are Pennycook’s
The cultural Politics of English as an International Language, 1994 and Phillipson⁵S
Linguistic Imperialism, 1992)¹.

However, very few writers understand culture in its sense of small culture. It
seems to me that, worried about macro cultural clashes, we have forgotten about
microcultural possibilities. In this discussion, it is important to remember that micro is
used in the sense of “small social grouping” (Holliday, 1997,1), that is, fewer people but
not in the sense of less important. It is true that there are authors who focus on classroom
life (Breen; 1985, van Lier; 1988, Prabhu; 1992, among others), but I have hardly seen the
word culture related to their work². With this issue in mind, the reader will understand
why it has been necessary to look outside the field of language education and make use
of literature in education in general (and in other specific areas) to discuss the concept of
learning culture and work on my own definition of the process of creating a learning
culture.

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