What do we mean by culture in EFL, and why is it so important?

Sep 11, 2025 - 10:09

A house without books is not a home.

Except for Esperanto, which has no native speakers, every single one of the world’s languages is a product of the culture of the people among whom the language grew and developed to the stage that it is at today.

In many cases the number of speakers of a language is and always has been relatively small – for instance Basque or Lithuanian – and the cultural identity easy to define. By contrast, at the other end of the scale Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English each have hundreds of millions of speakers, spread out over large parts of the globe, making the cultural background to these languages diverse and hard to define.

This is particularly the case with English, which is the (or an) official language in 88 countries worldwide, as well as being used as the main international language of business, showbusiness, geopolitics, science, international transport and tourism. From this, it is easy to imagine that English, unique among languages, has long fled the nest of the cultures that created it; and up to a point this is true. It was this idea that led IBM executive Jean-Paul Nerrière, back in 2004, to come up with the concept of Globish, a simplified form of international business English divested of any cultural background and free of figures of speech – a word-based language for communication among the world’s large and culturally diverse international business community.

Yet Globish, as Nerrière himself stressed, is not a language; it is a “subset” of English, a dialect. And the fact that Nerrière and others thought it useful or necessary to codify forms of English devoid of any cultural background is evidence of the huge role played by culture in the real forms of English from which they wanted their artificial form to be freed. The fact is that English, just like other languages, has not parted company from the culture that defines it, and never will do.

Apart from in the ESP class, where the culture behind the language studied is not so much the culture of native speakers of the language, but is, as with Globish, a specialised corporate scientific or professional culture, the teaching of culture is or should be an integral part of the English class.

So, what does “culture” mean, in the context of the English class?

People have been asking and answering this question for hundreds of years. From the Renaissance until the twentieth century, culture meant primarily the literature, and secondarily the philosophy and arts produced by speakers of the two major foreign languages taught in Europe at the time, the “dead” languages of Ancient Greek and Latin. This definition of culture essentially determined the nature of courses in living modern languages that were set up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in new universities worldwide. In many cases it still does, and there remain to this day thousands of universities in which a degree in “English” is essentially still a degree in English Literature, a course in which students may well learn a lot about Shakespeare, Dickens, or Walt Whitman, but next to nothing about the underlying culture of contemporary Britain, the United States, or the English speaking world.

This is not to suggest that Shakespeare, Dickens and Whitman are somehow irrelevant to the teaching of English in the twenty-first century. They are not; they are part and parcel of the vast corpus of culture that underlies the English language we read and listen to today. Taylor Swift, the most influential among contemporary singer/songwriters, has often professed her love of Shakespeare; and in a recent article (2024), Sydney University professor of English Liam Semler wrote “There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together. There’s no dumbing-down involved.”

Culture is so much more than just literature

The fact is that Shakespeare and Taylor Swift are both part of English “culture”, a vast tapestry woven not just from literature, but from multiple and varied threads. In addition to literature, culture encompasses not just all the other arts including music and cinema, but also “institutions” (governance, society, etc.), history, heritage, national preoccupations, lifestyles, politics, attitudes, values, thought, the impact of iconic figures on the world around them, and more. The culture behind the English language comes with an international core but multiple national or regional variants – British culture, American culture, Australian culture, and many others.

When it comes to language classes in schools and colleges, or in the general context of TESOL, teachers are not generally required to teach “culture”, nor even to teach literature. What teachers are expected to teach are the four core skills of language and communication, which are reading, listening, writing and speaking. “Culture” comes into the teaching process as a means to an end, not for its own sake, and excerpts from works of literature are often believed to represent the best examples of use of language on which the reading part of the syllabus can be based… which in some cases they may well be.

With the possible exception of the writers of the King James version of the Bible, nobody ever had more lasting influence on the English language and on literature than Shakespeare; but when, as teachers, we look for interesting texts to use with our more advanced students, we rarely think of Shakespeare, and for good reason. On the other hand, many teachers, notably those with a degree in English, still tend to see culture primarily in terms of literature, and overuse literary extracts for reading and listening in their classrooms. This is a shame, given that reading and listening activities provide students with the best possible opportunity to explore multiple branches of the culture of the English-speaking world far beyond the field of literature.

Indeed, teachers who do not include enough varied cultural content in their teaching may be hindering their students’ progress in English. Among the four concluding recommendations made in a recent article on Why English lessons plateau in L2, J. V. Torres underscored the need to “provide cultural context” to help students get a deeper understanding of what they are reading or listening to, stressing that “language is deeply tied to culture”. Even if to many teachers, this will be self-evident, for others, it is not.

Culture and reading in the curriculum

In many countries, the importance of culture is clearly recognised by curriculum boards, and a requirement to explore the cultural background to English underscores the choice of reading texts in local secondary school coursebooks; but this is not always the case, far from it. There is no prescribed literary or cultural reading list nor content for any of the major English certification exams, CPE, TOEFL or IELTS. Furthermore, the choice of texts featured in English coursebooks is often far from optimal in terms of cultural relevance – and sometimes completely irrelevant, or more relevant to the learner’s own culture than to the culture of the English-speaking countries.

With intermediate and advanced learners, the passive skills of reading and listening are the two most important language skills to develop, since progress in the active language skills of writing and speaking is largely dependent on acquiring new models, new understanding, and new examples through the passive skills. Providing students with the best reading and listening texts, which at the same time have good cultural content, can thus lead to better teaching, and better results.

So how does a teacher select the most appropriate texts? From B2 level upwards, many general English teachers’ first instinct, apart from following a coursebook, is to look for “authentic texts” – extracts from literary works, or newspaper and magazine articles of which there is a plethoric choice on the Internet; but there lies the problem. Literary texts are often selected not for their cultural relevance, but for their portrayal of human life, or because they come from popular classics like Pride and Prejudice, or The Great Gatsby. As for newspaper and magazine articles, these are all too often characterised by cultural references that are presumed to be understood by the publication’s own original local target audience (which was not EFL students), but will be either missed, or of limited interest, to language learners in another country perhaps halfway across the globe…. Unless the teacher both understands the cultural subtleties, such as humour, local references, or understatement, getting the most out of a literary extract or newspaper article can be a time-consuming and challenging task. For students below B2 level, the task is even harder.

On the bright side, among the plethoric choice of resources on the Internet, today’s teachers can have access to an immense choice of “authentic” texts, culturally relevant resources and other documents that can be used to inject a healthy dose of “culture” into their reading and listening classes. It’s just a matter of finding them.