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Culture is a central yet underexamined concept in TESOL. In comparison to other fields such as anthropology and cultural studies, there has been little serious discussion and critique of the concept in TESOL over the last two decades. This article offers a reassessment of the notion of culture in TESOL, taking recent work in critical anthropology and cultural studies, and to a lesser degree TESOL itself, as a starting point. It proposes a revised view of culture that is intended to serve TESOL practitioners into the 21st century, or that can at least provide a takeoff point from which such a view may be developed.
Except for language, learning, and teaching, there is perhaps no more
important concept in the field of TESOL than culture. Implicitly or
explicitly, ESL teachers face it in everything they do. Yet there has been
remarkably little direct attention given to the notion of culture in
TESOL over the past 15 years. The 1991 volume of TESOL Quarterly, for
instance, devoted in part to describing major trends and concepts in the
field, featured no general discussion of the concept; and only 10
full-length articles in the journal over the past 15 years have included the
term (or alternate forms of the word) in their titles.
One possible interpretation of this trend is that the field in general
has adopted a received, commonsense view of culture that seems to
merit little discussion, as it is so widely held in academia and the world at
large. This appears in fact to be the case in several related fields, such as
cross-cultural communication and psychology. A second possibility is that
the standard notion of culture has fallen into such disrepute in recent
years that TESOL practitioners and theorists have gradually come to
eschew it largely or altogether, finding other concepts and categories—
such as identity and difference—by which to treat some of the phenomena
that were earlier dealt with under culture. This appears actually to be the
case in parts of cultural anthropology and cultural studies.
Whatever the truth in regard to general approach or approaches to
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