The conceptualisation of "culture" in Australian languages-in-education policy

Abstract

Culture is recognised as an important part of languages teaching in Australia and has been increasingly integrated into policy and curriculum documents and the general rhetoric of languages education. The result is that policies include statements about aspects of cultural competence. However, the nature and scope of the cultural component in languages education has not been clearly articulated in these documents and a variety of competing and conflicting approaches to cultural knowledge are to be found. In particular, there is a key conflict in policy and curriculum documents between the expressed outcomes for the teaching of cultural knowledge as a part of language education and the ways in which this knowledge is conceptualised in the same documents.