T

he question of to what extent culture shapes the way one learns a language is certainly a broad one, and cannot be satisfactorily answered by simply resorting to the notion of culture as an abstract entity.

Such an understanding of culture as a norm, custom, or tradition shared by a group member of a certain community is too vague a notion that does not embrace the idea of human beings as intricate individuals. This understanding also suggests that culture is monolithic, static and deterministic.

Thus, to get a fuller sense of individual students learning a language, we need to understand the basic premise that every individual is cultural.

That is, each individual student has complex, inconsistent, disunified and fragmented personalities and subjectivities.

They display unique, unpredictable ways of perceiving reality they are facing in life. In this sense, we cannot assume they are, despite coming from the same members of a community, culturally homogenous, and that they share similar learning experiences.

Neither can we assume they bring with them homogenous learning traditions.

Now with the shifting perspective of culture, we are prepared to argue that the impact of individual students’ culture on language learning is very substantial.

The ways students employ specific learning strategies, think, express opinions, argue, and counter-argue are very much shaped by their cultures.

Learning will become a painful experience for learners unless teachers are mindful of the heterogeneity of their students’ cultures. Imposing unfamiliar cultural constructs foreign to students would be a great disservice to them.

An infamous example of a classroom practice would be the teaching of critical thinking to our students.

Not many people are aware that the notion of critical has been simplistically reduced as a construct derived from Western learning tradition.

And not many are alert that such a conceived construct might be incompatible with students’ individual cultures.

Scientifically-sounding terms such as rationalistic, linear thinking and logic have always been associated with the notion of critical thinking. Students are often bullied to think critically so as not to be labeled ‘illogical’, and ‘irrational’.

The application of the construct via the teaching of writing and reading, for example, is quite common especially in schools bearing the label ‘international’.

Critical thinking now seems to have a commercial trade mark among elite schools. The cacophonous exhortation seems to be like “Go to schools that offer critical thinking lessons, if you want to be a critical student”.

It is quite disconcerting, however, to hear a sweeping generalization that the students are alleged to
be ‘illogical’ and ‘irrational’ simply because they cannot read and write critically.

Thus, being critical and uncritical has been reduced deterministically to whether or not one can successfully perform academic assignments.

Viewing individual students from a cultural perspective presupposes the dynamism and the instability of the notion of culture.

In a specific context like classroom, it may no longer be relevant to view culture as a norm shared by a member of certain community. It is the individual students that are cultural, not a group of students.

Given the diverse individual cultures students may bring to class, it is rather pointless to argue that failure in academic assignments is merely due to students’ cognitive deficiency.

Sensitivity toward cultural differences and diversity in the classroom contexts helps students to be
aware of their unique agencies and subjectivities.

Assisting students from the perspective of their own individual cultures may not only give them freedom to discover learning strategies as discursively shaped by their cultures, but also throw light to how the students should be treated fairly.

As learning is shaped considerable by culture, so too students’ attempts to respond to questions in the classroom assessment impinge upon their individual cultures.

Some students might respond well, for example, to questions in a writing exam that address controversial topics.

Others, by contrast, feel uncomfortable with such questions as explicitly writing blatant statements critiquing other people’s arguments is not a common practice.

The implication of the above discussion is clear. The complex construct of individual culture forces us teachers to reconsider classrooms as a site of struggle where students display their distinctive subjectivities as they attempt to learn a language.

This in the end impinges upon the way classroom teaching materials and teaching assessment are designed, and the way teaching methods are modified.