Cultural beliefs and language teaching: The case of university English teachers in Japan

Culture is an evolving concept and a vast body of work exists that demonstrates its changing nature. The same can be said of the cultural dimension of language teaching yet despite a consensus emerging on its importance there is little work that indicates what actual practicing teachers believe and are doing regarding the cultural dimension of language teaching. This is particularly the case with the Japanese university context; an educational environment where the role of language teacher and research merge.

The primary foci of this research project were to uncover the concepts of culture held by teachers, the degree to which essentialism may or may not be present in such concepts, and if these are manifest in their teaching. To aid consideration of teachers’ views on culture, two scales were hypothesized: Essentialism in the Concept of Culture (ECC) and Intercultural Inclination (ICI). A mixed method approach was followed that employed surveys, interviews and class observations. Previous work on the subject typically only used either a quantitative or qualitative approach.

The results offer insight into teachers views on culture and identifies certain issues that may impact how teachers understand and incorporate culture in their classrooms. One major theme throughout these results is the need for a more sophisticated and systematic approach to teacher training regarding culture as a concept. This is especially important given that the results also suggest that teachers with high ICI can also have high ECC. In addition to the findings, the scales developed may be of future use to teacher trainers for the analysis of needs and/or the impact of training.