Remembering the Future

2
记忆未来
Compiling Knowledge of Another Culture
积累异国文化知识

Galal Walker
Mari Noda
吴伟克
野田真理 著
王庆新 译
李敏儒 校

21
 Remembering the Future
Compiling Knowledge of Another Culture

Galal Walker
Mari Noda

INTRODUCTION

In the study of language, nothing has been discussed more and with less effect
than the relationship between language and culture. The works of eminent
scholars reporting extensive observations on the relation of culture to language
would fill the shelves of a good-sized library and inform many disciplines —
philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, education, and literary
criticism — all of which have extensive literatures on this topic.i In what is easily
conceptual overkill, writers have repeatedly demonstrated that whenever
language is used for communication, it is a component of a specific situation in a
specific culture.
As early as in 1955, the Northeast Conference of the Teaching of Foreign
Languages appointed a committee to investigate the place of culture and civ-
ilization in foreign languages and teaching (Wylie).ii In his preface to another
Northeast Conference Report dedicated to culture in language (Dodge
1972:10-11), Edgerton states: “It is naïve to choose to believe, as some people
— both old and young — do, that a human being is a free spirit, that he is not
‘programmed’ from childhood on by his culture.” We have all read from these
works; however, like all others whose occupations revolve around language
(with the possible exception of advertisers), language teachers and
second-language acquisition researchers still conduct their affairs as if language
and culture have only an incidental relationship.
Twenty-five years after Edgerton’s observation on the deep relationship
between culture and language, culture in our language programs “seems to be
superficially included in the forms of songs, food, and games” (Lange 1999:113).
The Standards for Foreign Language Learning [SFLL]: Preparing for the 21st Century

22
 Remembering the Future

(National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project 1996) go beyond

this superficial list to a more elaborate list that is categorized into perspectives,
products, and practices and that conceptualizes culture as one of the five
components of foreign language study: communication, cultures, connections,
comparisons, and communities. Even when culture was demoted to one part in
five of the foreign language study formula, the result was to produce lists of
perspectives, products, and practices that daunt even the most complete
programs of foreign language study. For example, the 1998 draft of Standards for
Japanese Language Learning has extended the already ambitious K-12 training
period proposed by SFLL to K- 16 in order to meet the demands of training
Americans to communicate with the Japanese. When confronted with the idea
that the instructional equivalent of sixteen years of training is necessary to
produce culturally adept users of Japanese, even the most competent of
instructors, who at best have 400-600 classroom hours with their students,
would be unsure of how to act. The German poet Heinz Johst supposedly
declared: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” Foreign language
teachers, being more peaceable than poets on the whole, just tend to head for
the door or turn the page.
The enormity of the task may explain why we have continued to ignore the
conclusions of some of the most important intellectuals of this century by failing
to integrate their teachings into our practice in any systematic and consistent
manner. When we put aside academic ideologies and allegiances to attend to the
practical matters of teaching and learning languages, the matter becomes clear:
Culture and language are two of the most complex concepts we will ever
encounter and life, unfortunately, is short. If in the course of a learning career,
we can deal with either language or culture in a moderately competent way, we
feel extremely fortunate. If language and culture are indeed inseparable
components of communication events, however, language pedagogues have no
choice but to raise their sights and deal with this issue head on.
This is what we shall do here. The authors have between them five decades
of teaching Americans to participate in the cultures of China and Japan —
cultures that are historically and formally distinct from the cultural inheritances
of most Americans. Inasmuch as the large majority of students of Chinese and
Japanese undertake their studies with the intention of communicating with
people from China and Japan as part of their careers, we have been forced by the
needs of our students to look at culture as the primary focus of our instruction.

23
 Remembering the Future

We have come to recognize that, when learning to communicate in a foreign

language, our students are really learning the cultures. Their increasing abilities
in the languages make the learning of culture all the more effective. This
discussion addresses teaching language as teaching culture, getting to that
discussion straightaway by brazenly ignoring the subtleties and delicacies of all
those elegant discourses on culture and treating the concept in the most
utilitarian manner. The Chinese have a way of expressing this kind of brashness:
抛砖引玉 pao zhuan yin yu (throw-bricks-attract-jade). In this emboldened spirit,
we offer our unrefined suggestions in the hope that they will inspire loftier and
more refined responses from our readers.

CULTURE AS PERFORMANCE

First, we offer our operational concept of culture: Culture is what we do (those

folks out in Oregon who sell athletic shoes to the known universe got that part
right!) and, also, how we know what we have done. In other words, culture
frames our behaviors and gives us the means to recognize the completion of
events and artifacts in our worlds. On the personal level this implies that culture
is behavior by one individual that is understood by that individual and others in
specific contexts. It is situated knowledge: the situations are social, conventional
and many — but constrained — not everything conceivable is possible in every
culture. What we do in our cultures can be understood by our intentions and our
understanding of the intentions of others (that is, our interpretations of them).
What we do is what we are — and what we are is what any specific culture allows
us to be.
The flow of social life occurs in a sequence of performances: discrete frames of
specified times, places, roles, scripts, and audiences. We understand the
intentions of specific behaviors of others because our cultures provide possible
performances in which to situate that behavior. If the behavior is speech, we
construct performance frames to create or interpret meanings. A common
Japanese expression sumimasen can provide an example.

24
 Remembering the Future

TABLE 1. Performances Involving Sumimasen in Japanese.

Interpreta‐ Time Place Role(s) Script Audience
tion
“I apologize at the in the student T: Hai other
for not beginning classroom and shukudai o students
turning in my of a class teacher Teeshutsu‐
assignment.” suite kudasai.
“OK, turn in your
homework
assignments.”
S: Sumimasen.
“I want as a at a customer C: Sumimasen. other
attention customer restaurant and S: Hai, omatase customers
(service).” waiting to server itashimashita. and
place an “Yes, sorry to restaurant
order have kept you staff
waiting.”
“I want when a on a train two Standing: other
you to move new passeng‐ Sumimasen. passengers,
over to make group of ers Sitting: Doozo. sitting and
space for me passengers one “Please standing
to sit.” just sitting, (go ahead).”
boarded another
the train standing
“Thank you.” upon in the office Secretary: Hai. other
receiving a office worker “Here you are.” workers
typed and a Worker:
document secretary Sumimasen.

Note in Table 1 the various interpretations (given in English) that are

possible for this expression when it occurs in different commonplace
performances. Readers who speak languages other than Japanese might
experiment with the effect of moving from one performance frame to another
by reflecting on how a single expression would or would not be appropriate in
all the given situations.
The implications of this concept of performed culture for language study is
that no one really learns a foreign language. Rather, we learn how to do
particular things in a foreign language; and the more things we learn to do, the
more expert we are in that language. Successful teachers of foreign languages

25
 Remembering the Future

create learning environments in which they present the particular things that are
accepted in and typical of the target culture. Successful learners compile these
presentations into memories that underlie acceptable behavior in cultures and
languages that they have yet to experience outside their courses or classrooms,
In short, they are trying to remember how to behave in a social environment that
will occur in their futures. The nearest analogy we can give is that of a coach
preparing someone to play in a future game by inculcating the rules and moves
of the game. In this context, a game can be understood as nothing more than a
performance with an agreed-upon scoring system.
Performances that are appropriate to a specific culture are not simple to
stage. The main reason is that the culture of everyday life — especially our own
— is largely invisible. The distinctive features of greetings, leave takings,
apologies, expressions of concern — the behaviors that make up the flow of
daily life — are not remarkable enough to encourage notation or declaration. We
live our lives as automatically as we speak our native languages. Most of us are
no more capable of explaining why we greet others the way we do than we are of
giving an accurate account of how we indicate definite and indefinite objects or
events in our speech. But language teachers and others who spend much time on
the interaction of two cultures and languages are better equipped than most to
notice culturally determined behavior. As Hall (1976) pointed out, we notice the
hidden or covert culture only when we observe outsiders misusing it. Because
most language teachers speak at least two languages and spend time in the
cultures of the languages we speak, we are constantly in the company of culture
“dashers,” even, alas, when we are alone. When we note inappropriate or
counterproductive behaviors of others or ourselves, we are a mere step away
from noting the behaviors that are appropriate to that situation in that culture.
By analyzing behavior (including linguistic elements) in specified situations in
the culture our students are studying, we can prepare the “performances” for
our students that will most benefit their future needs.
Coaches are concerned with preparing their players to score in contests:
training their minds and bodies to react in specific ways in specific situations and
making sure their behavior in the heat of the action conforms to the rules and
expectations of the game. Language teachers prepare their students to negotiate
a new culture successfully, developing a memory that can be effectively drawn
upon in the rapid flow of interactions or transactions with members of that
culture. How do we get students to know the procedures for situated

26
 Remembering the Future

performances in the culture being studied? How can they successfully navigate
new experiences without a coach or a rulebook to consult? This is the direction
in which we wish to take this discussion from here.

CULTURAL MEMORY

Remembering is the mind’s method of coordinating past events

with current events to enable generalization and prediction.
(Schank 1990: 1)

We each have had the experience of building a complex and deep memory
for social interaction in our native cultures through years of socialization within
our families and communities. When we later add knowledge of a foreign culture
learned in or shortly before adulthood, we cannot begin to compile a memory
that comes close to the complexity and richness of the native culture (Walker,
forthcoming). We can, however, develop a memory that equips us to enter into
the flow of the foreign culture and can continue to increase our capacity to meet
its social demands.
Depending on the type and the extent of experiences, the memories we
construct are arranged in different architectures of knowledge, or schemata.
Operating with schemata that lack certain types or areas of knowledge can lead
to individual stress, for example, when we are suddenly expected to perform in a
novel situation for which we lack experience and, thus, the appropriate memory,
we can only fill the gap with analogous memories or consult with persons who
have the appropriate knowledge. Whether at such times we succeed or fail in the
actual performance, the novel experience of encountering the unknown
provides the possibility of adding to our memory a set of possible behaviors that
we can use in the future.
Usually, these novel situations occur as minor events that we manage with
little difficulty: making a purchase at a new kind of store, for example. Our
memories constructed from previous experiences allow us to hypothesize about
the new situation, and our subsequent success or failure at achieving our
intentions informs us of the correctness of the hypothesis. On the other hand,
we can imagine the difficulty of having to cope with a major novelty where our
accumulated memory is inadequate. The excessive publicizing of Princess Diana
in Great Britain and Empress Michiko in Japan are the most conspicuous

27
 Remembering the Future

examples of this in recent years. Both women had to develop rather quickly the
personas of functioning royalty in early adulthood. They succeeded in bringing
about some changes in their respective households by being creative and
innovative in “scoring points” within the rules of the nobility “game.” We
followed them in the popular media as they set about to build their cultural
memories as members of royal families through numerous engagements and
official functions followed by criticisms — sometimes behind the scenes,
sometimes painfully in public. In Britain, the game was in the end lost. In the
case of Empress Michiko, the game continues. By now, however, Empress
Michiko, like any accomplished performer, is able to monitor, evaluate, and
adjust her performance on the basis of the specialized knowledge of
expectations placed on Japanese nobility that she has compiled over decades of
playing the role.

CLASSROOM MEMORY

If a course of study is not forgotten completely, the concern of a language

teacher is the nature of the memories taken away from the course: Have the
learners retained memories of the class and the teacher or a memory of the skill?
A student of Chinese who remembers only that the teacher was agreeable and
that the course was difficult is like the chess student who remembers only that
his coach smoked a pipe and that the sessions were held in a closed room. Both
are unable to use that knowledge to play the game. Pat Schroder, a member of
the House of Representatives from Colorado for twenty-four years, recalls a
Chinese class at her university that seemed to build her self-esteem but, as
reported by her, did not provide her with any practical knowledge of the
language and culture:

I also took Chinese, a ferociously difficult course. We were

taught to write the intricate Chinese characters by holding an egg
in the writing hand. If you did it wrong, the shell broke and you
had egg dripping from your arms and sleeves — the
embarrassing Chinese equivalent of getting egg on your face.
Chinese made me really listen because different tonal inflections
can make one word take on many meanings. (“Ma” can mean
mother, horse, linen, or chicken pox, so you’d better be careful or
you end up saying something unflatteringly equine about your

28
 Remembering the Future

mother.) But, it was a mental workout and made me confident I

could tackle anything. (Schroeder 1998:101)

Language programs have a beginning and an end. If the goal in offering

these programs is for students to function successfully in the languages and
cultures being studied, it behooves us to consider the memory they are con-
structing from what teachers present in a course. A course may succeed on one
level if students fondly remember their experiences in a language program: how
much they liked the teacher, how enlightened they feel, how confident they feel
about themselves as a result, or how many friends they make in the course of
their participation. But if they do not have a usable cultural memory that
prepares them for future performances in the target culture, the course has failed
as part of a language program. Learners should be able to present themselves in
ways that are required and accepted in the target culture. Even the most
comprehensive program cannot prepare its participants for all possible
interactions; for a program to be successful, however, its graduates should have
accumulated a sufficient level of performance experience and cultural memory
to permit them to recognize and learn from new situations. As is the case of any
performer, students of a foreign language have to be able to analyze their own
performance critically and use that knowledge to develop improved
performances.

RECOGNIZING ANOTHER CULTURE

Students of a language are apt not to recognize behavioral culture when they
encounter it. They are very likely to mistake a culture for the artifacts of that
culture. For example, Japanese culture has provided us with easily recognized
elements: anime, sumo, haiku, sake, kabuki, and tea ceremonies. A student may
come to the study of Japanese as an aficionado of these or other specialties of
Japanese life and be genuinely motivated to learn the language. However, she or
he may be completely unaware of what sort of behavior is expected in that
society. The following passage is a self-introduction of a young man who wants
to succeed in Japanese culture but is unaware of a basic requirement for doing
that:

I have a passion for Japanese language, culture and people. I want

29
 Remembering the Future

to know the language really well so that I sound just like an

educated native speaker, so that I can interact with the Japanese
in a seamless manner….. I believe we are all created equal: I am
proud of the fact that I am not good at using the polite language
in Japanese. (student)

Language always operates in a culture. The default culture in which

beginning language learners use language is their native culture (base culture)
unless the teacher creates an alternative, such as the culture’s being studied
(target culture). American culture operates on the overt expression — some
might say the myth — of equality. No matter how clearly an individual may
understand his or her relative place in a group and how emotionally powerful
that identification may be felt, Americans are likely to expect the outward
trappings of social equality. This occurs even when a hierarchy clearly exists
within a particular group structure. Corporations often advise their employees to
be on first-name basis with managers and CEOs; the same is often true with
college professors and their students. The same hierarchical arrangement may
exist both in American culture and Japanese culture, but it may be overtly
ignored by a cultural preference for the expression of social flatness by
Americans and systematically encoded in the linguistic behavior of the Japanese.
Americans feel comfortable with the masking of hierarchy; the Japanese, on the
other hand, feel comfortable with the practice of indicating the position of the
speaker in the hierarchy by the choice of verbs or verb-endings. To insist on the
American treatment of hierarchy when using the Japanese language is analogous
to insisting on dribbling a ball across a volleyball court because it is an accepted
way to transport the ball in basketball. Different cultures and different games are
played according to different sets of shared rules and expectations. Once you
start dribbling a ball you are no longer playing volleyball. When you ignore social
position in Japanese speech, you cease to communicate in Japanese culture.
The main purpose of a pedagogical emphasis on gamesmanship is to foster a
long-term metaphorical association of culture to game. If students of Chinese
can think of playing Chinese culture rather than American culture in the same
way they might play tennis rather than baseball, they may gain a more durable
attitude toward the undertaking (Walker 1994:viii). Games do not have to “make
sense” in any absolute way. No one will seriously contend that baseball is a more
rational game than tennis or vice versa. Different games share features, but

30
 Remembering the Future

shared features may have contrasting, even conflicting meanings and outcomes.
Competence in one game often does not translate into competence in another.
Both baseball and tennis utilize the basic concepts of a hitting instrument, a ball,
hitting the ball, and boundaries to the playing field, but exceeding boundaries is
a gain in one game and a loss in the other. Each game has its own written rules,
but the rules and the books of rules are not the game. No one confuses a
summer afternoon at the tennis courts or baseball diamond with reading books
of rules in the library. Finally, no one competent in baseball would expect to
walk onto the tennis court one day, with no knowledge of the rules of tennis and
no prior experience hitting the ball with a racket or volleying with a partner, and
display an equal mastery of the game of tennis.
If we consider a game a performance with a shared system for keeping score,
this is where playing games is beneficial to the general enterprise because games
are conducive to creating the kind of openness and spontaneity that many
recognize as necessary for successful language learning. Games can be devised
around specific transactions that are repeated a sufficient number of times to
inculcate automatic responses. Games draw spectators and cause excitement
because different instances of the same game bring about plays that are different
from plays previously seen or recorded. The possibilities are infinite, but not
chaotic. The natural question to ask then is how we inculcate in our students
rules for performance in the target culture, or how we help our learners
construct memory to perform effectively in their target culture.

COMPILING CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge, then, is experiences and stories, and intelligence is

the apt use of experience and the creation and telling of stories.
Memory is memory for stories, and the major processes of
memory are the creation, storage, and retrieval of stories.
(Schank 1990: 16)

Wisdom is often ascribed to those who can tell just the right story
at the right moment and who often have a large number of
stories to tell. (Schank 1990: 14)

We can go to considerable expense and effort to arrange opportunities for

our students to learn foreign languages and cultures. If we assume that our

31
 Remembering the Future

reason for this is to make our students appear intelligent when they are living
and working in those languages and cultures, the job of a language teacher is to
present the kind of stories that will bring about that effect. At the same time, the
main activity of a foreign language student is to learn to tell and participate in
these stories. Successful careers in language learning progress through a series of
such stories, necessarily going from simple to complex and practically going
from the most common to the less common.
In the pedagogy of performing a learned culture, learning stories is a part of
a larger process of compiling the memories that will support participation in the
target culture. Just as it is with anyone learning to play tennis, someone learning
to function in a foreign culture must go through the process of being introduced
to new concepts and then experience reconciling the concepts to physical
movement. The process for the language learner in the learning environment is
diagramed in Figure 1:

32
 Remembering the Future

The seven elements in the “cycle of compiling culture” (Figure 1) are divided
into agent (triangle), activity (rectangle), and memory (oval). This cycle is
conceived of as a series of steps in a continually expanding spiral of information
and experience.

1. Persona is the starting point and the sole agent in the learning of a foreign
language. Persona refers to the personal information that the learner is willing to
commit to the learning experience. The persona of a learner can vary
considerably from one learning environment to another: the physics whiz may
be hesitant and unsure in the language class. Not confusing the persona of the
individual with the individual him — or herself is important because the persona
can change rapidly in a period of language study, a change that is much faster
than a change in the personality of an individual. If as language instructors we
are ever tempted to make rash judgments about our students, we can reflect on
how little the Chinese teacher of Evelyn Waugh’s fictional student Miss Aimée
Thanatogenos must have known about her as she sat through his classes:

“And what else did you take at College?”

“Just Psychology and Chinese. I didn’t get on so well with

Chinese. But, of course, they were secondary subjects, too; for
Cultural background.”

“Yes. And what was your main subject?”

“Beauticraft.”

“Oh.”

“You know — permanents, facials, wax — everything you get in

a Beauty Parlour. Only, of course, we went in for history and
theory, too. I wrote my thesis on ‘Hairstyling in the Orient.’ That
is why I took Chinese. I thought it would help, but it didn’t. But I
got my diploma with special mention for Psychology and Art.”
(Waugh 1948: 90-91)

2. Culture knowledge and language knowledge is the memory based on information

about culture and language. It is the grist of textbooks and lectures, but it is also

33
 Remembering the Future

conveyed in the interactions, interpretations, and presentations in the daily

operation of a class. Learners bring with them to their foreign language
classroom an immeasurable amount of knowledge of culture and language based
on their native cultures and languages. They may also know something about the
target culture: they may have read volumes on Chinese history, studied Japanese
flower arranging, or even had daily dealings with a Japanese businesswoman to
whom they solemnly bow every time they meet her. All of this is possible
without knowing a word of Chinese or Japanese.
Language knowledge is what is conveyed about the linguistic code, from
phonology to pragmatics. This knowledge base consists of the rules for pro-
ducing well-formed utterances and the examples extracted from the language
sample that compose the pedagogical corpus of a language. Stable language
knowledge allows the learner to manipulate linguistic forms easily, without
premeditation. In a course of language study, students may learn, among other
things, that Chinese does not have the past tense or necessarily distinguish plural
from singular nouns, that Japanese does not always express a grammatical
subject and that it borrows extensively from English. Students may even be able
to produce the complex script of Chinese or Japanese and to form sentences,
using a given word. All of this is possible with little or no knowledge of the target
culture.
It is easy to be preoccupied with language knowledge, which is more
accessible than culture knowledge. When a student uses an English word in the
middle of a Chinese conversation, the teacher can detect the problem right away,
but cultural inconsistency is less conspicuous. A well-intended teacher may even
encourage students to focus on procedures for expressing the base culture in the
sample of the target language that is being taught. In such an instance the
cultural information may be drawn largely from the base culture.
The success of a student in a language course is determined by the teacher or
manager of the course. The teacher establishes what a student must do to be
judged a good performer in the class. If success in the course is predicated on
giving the student an exotic experience, something like avoiding breaking an egg
when writing or folding a paper crane will signal success. If the goal is to inform
students about procedures, products, and perspectives of the target culture, as
implied in SFLL, students who demonstrate comprehension of lectures and
demonstrations on topics related to these aspects of culture are deemed
successful.

34
 Remembering the Future

If culture is a necessary component of communication and we assume that

classrooms are places where communication occurs, every foreign language
class will be dominated by either the base culture or the target culture. If learners
are to use the forms and communicative strategies of the target language, they
must know the features of the performance — when and where something is
said or written, who initiates and receives the message, what the linguistic
inventory is, and who might be observing.
Assessment of students’ knowledge of culture and language involves the
most traditional of paper-and-pencil tests — translations, filling in of blanks,
matching, and sentence analysis, for example. Occasionally, students’ skills on
isolated linguistic or cultural practices may be included. No matter how well
students perform on such assessments, performance here is not a clear indicator
of how well communication in the language has been learned. If the goal of the
course is to develop proficiencies in the language and culture being studied,
target cultural information will predominate, and the assessment procedures will
shadow the demands of the target culture. In such a situation students will focus
on what it takes to succeed in the target culture, beyond what it takes to succeed
in the course — and what it takes is more than knowledge about language and
culture. Students need to engage in performances.

3. Performances and games are the enactment of scripts or behaviors situated at

a specified time and place with roles and audiences specified. Knowing what to
say and when to say it does not directly lead to being able perform in ways that
are recognized as appropriate to the target culture. Participation in a culture is
for the most part not premeditated — culture is made “on the fly.” There is no
more time to recall rules in a target-culture interaction than there is in the
production of a well-formed sentence or accurate pronunciation. Automatic
response must be learned, and such reflexive behavior is achieved one
performance at a time.
Performances are communicative events. In a foreign language class a
performance consists of a pedagogical sample of language in a cultural context.
The cultural context can be provided by either the base or the target culture.
Chinese greetings can provide an example: Among the first expressions foreign
learners of Chinese encounter is Ni hao: This is often translated as “Hello,” or
“ How are you!” and thus is expressed in the contexts in which these English
greetings occur in Western culture. The assumption that a Chinese expression of

35
 Remembering the Future

greeting will be universally appropriate leads to Americans’ saying Ni hao to

everyone with whom they establish eye contact, part of the stereotype of
Americans speaking Chinese that one sees in comedy sketches and movies. In
the Chinese-American film A Great Wall one of its characters scolds a young
man who has used Ni hao to greet a young woman to whom he has not been
introduced:

“What’s with this Ni hao? You’re not an American going around

yelling Ni hao, ni hao everytime you see a stranger.”
你好个什么呀？又不是美国人，见了生人还得你好你好
的。
(Wang and Sun 1986)

If, on the other hand, learners of Chinese as a foreign language have this
greeting in the context of Chinese culture, they know it as a way to greet
acquaintances in particular circumstances and will not go down the street saying
Ni hao to bewildered folks to whom they are not known and who do not know
them.
Figure 2 presents greetings that would be appropriate in a pedagogical
sample of basic Japanese. A performance would be one of the options for
greeting or not greeting considered appropriate in Japanese culture when
encountering someone. The actor participates in one possible performance of
greeting in Japanese as he responds to the various elements of performance: the
need to make a greeting, the person whom he is greeting, the place and time of
the greeting, the audience of the greeting, and the appropriate body posture and
verbal utterance. If one morning the actor encounters in close proximity a
person he knows and has no reason to avoid, he greets this person, usually with
a gesture — a bow, a nod, or a raising of the right hand. If the person is someone
who occupies a higher social status, the actor utters Ohayoo gozaimasu (“Good
morning”) as he bows. This is just one performance within the schema of
performances of face-to-face greetings in Japanese, as shown in figure 3.

36
Remembering the Future

37
 Remembering the Future

A different greeting script, such as Irasshaimase “Come in (to the store),” will
be interpreted as appropriate to a different time, place, role(s) of those involved
in the interaction, and audience. Irasshaimase is commonly used by a worker in a
store or an eating establishment to an entering customer, or by a worker in an
inn or a hotel to an arriving guest. Hence, its usual translation into English is
“welcome.” Japanese visitors to the Cincinnati Airport encounter Irasshaimase
along with “Welcome,” “Bienvenue,” “Wilikommen,” displayed on a large

38
 Remembering the Future

billboard in the international arrival concourse. Unfortunately, this expression,

used in this particular context fails to convey the intended message of “welcome
to a visitor.” Instead, it sounds as if the state of Kentucky, the location of the
Cincinnati Airport, is welcoming a commercial guest (from whom the state
would like to benefit financially). To use irasshaimase in this context is an example
of an ineffective performance in which language knowledge and culture
knowledge are not matched in a way acceptable to members of the target
culture.
As performances can be small (an apology) or great (a novel of redemption), so
too are games (that is, performances with a defined scoring system). We can
imagine a spectrum of performances with scoring systems (games) that range
from the momentary (a sale), to the intermediate (a game of Monopoly), to the
long term (the stock market). Games inject a clear meaning into the associated
activity and add the possibility of emotion as players risk their interests in
win-or-lose situations. Thus, games that conform to expectations of the target
culture provide a powerful learning experience, while at the same time they
create an operational analogy to participating in a culture that differs systemically
from the learners’ base culture(s).

4. Story (memory) is the personal memory of having experienced a per-

formance or a game. Underlying the ability to participate in a culture is a
memory for that culture, and that memory, according to Schank, consists of
stories. When learners leave a foreign language class or some other form of
instructional session, they take away a memory of that experience. It can be a
memory that has little relation to the ultimate purpose of communicating in the
language — holding an egg while writing difficult graphs, translating a sentence
into the base language, or creating a sentence from a given element in the
context of a classroom requirement. Or it can be a story of having done
something in the target culture. As illustrated in the “Schema of Performances
of Face-to-Face Greetings in Japanese” (Figure 2), a story would be the memory
of the experience of having greeted or not greeted someone you met. If you had
only the experiences of greeting acquaintances in the morning and meeting
people for the first time, the stories of the performances of Ohayoo, Ohayoo
gozaimasu, and Hajimemashite would at some point constitute your memory for
greetings. If you were subsequently to take a job hosting a morning television
show, you would soon add the story for a public greeting in the morning —

39
 Remembering the Future

Minasama, ohayoo gozaimasu — and thereby increase your memory for greetings. If
you did not get the glamorous television job and instead found yourself working
as a clerk in a bakery, you would have to add Irassyaimasu to your memory for
greetings. Or you might have created this entire memory structure by
performing simulations and role-plays in the classroom.

5. Compilation results, once learners have gained the ability to tell or enact a
story, add to their memory by putting the story together with other stories they
know, to form larger knowledge domains. This compilation can be assisted
through the structure of the curriculum, the design of study materials, the design
of assessment instruments, and classroom activities. Learners compile
functional memories of target culture behavior in processes of memorizing and
remembering that take the form of the enactment of dialogs, playing of
target-culture roles, participating in monitored simulations, and creating
improvisations that are acceptable to members of the culture. By being trained
to be aware of the features of specific performances, learners can associate a
newly learned story with previously learned stories.

6. Cases and sagas: The memory constructed around even one simple
utterance such as sumimasen (see Table 1) or one speech act such as greetings can
be complex. We can simplify our management of such memories by categorizing
the target culture memory into cases and sagas. A case is a series of stories about
doing something in a culture; for example, figure 2 could represent a case for
greeting in Japanese. A saga is a series of stories about a specific set of people or
a specific location. It would represent what a learner knows about behaving
around particular people or at particular places. In a course of foreign language
study, one saga would undoubtedly deal with the classroom situation and the
people involved in the course. It is highly desirable, however, that the
“classroom saga” not be the only saga the learner learns.
Sagas and cases represent what a learner is capable of dealing with in the
target culture. The use of narrative, both in print and in video, is a common way
to create a saga. Successful films, television programs, short stories, and novels
are coherent treatments of sets of characters often in particular settings — that
is, they create sharable worlds. This makes these works effective culture-learning
devices, especially if the study of these artifacts leads to learners who gain the
ability to tell tales and to recognize and participate in common performances of

40
 Remembering the Future

the target culture. Being able to tell tales from popular target-culture artifacts,
such as a television show or a novel, is one of the surest ways to establish a bond
with members of that culture. Although what passes for creative works in the
popular media often contain situations that are uncommon — and hence
appealing to popular curiosity — believability, or adhering to cultural
possibilities, is usually necessary to make the productions accessible to large
portions of the potential audience. It is this quality that lends these works to the
learning of the target culture. Textbooks that follow particular characters or that
provide extensive treatments to particular settings, such as places of
employment or a household, also contribute to the construction of sagas. The
value of a particular saga can be measured by the applicability of the content to
successful communication in the target culture. In foreign language study, this
quality far outweighs any appeal to any base-culture interests of the learners. The
concept of saga reflects a commonplace notion that we perform better socially
with familiar people and in familiar places. The compilation of sagas in the
course of language study gives learners the impression of continuity and
connectedness in their studied language even though the quantity of
information in their knowledge of the target culture is much less than natives of
that culture.
Cases are compiled into knowledge structures of the world — what you
know of the world and what you can do in it. The number system or systems of
a particular culture; how prices are conveyed in signage, speech, and gesture;
how a purchase is negotiated; how to ask for information in a department store
— this could be a series of stories within a larger case for “shopping.” In
addition, each of these could be a story in other cases, such as “mathematics,”
“advertising,” or “getting around a city.” Cases are rich with notions and
functions. They can be compiled by direct presentation, by extracting elements
from dialogs and narratives, and by combining these elements with previously
learned knowledge.

7. Second-Culture Worldview Construction is the compilation of stories into the

knowledge of a learned culture, a lifelong undertaking leading to a new
repertoire of attitudes and skills and even the sense of a new self. As learners,
their ability to function in the target culture improves; stories become
subroutines in other stories and are compiled by experience into large, complex
knowledge structures that become increasingly separated from the knowledge of

41
 Remembering the Future

a base culture. A student of Japanese may begin compiling a case for greetings
with a simple story for greeting a friend in the morning. At that point, greeting in
Japanese would probably be an added component for conducting greetings in
American culture. When he meets his Japanese teacher, he will have to
consciously decide to greet her in Japanese or English, perhaps confusing the
appropriate greeting for the time of day and not knowing whether to bow or not.
But after having experienced a number of performances of greetings in Japanese,
he will have compiled a case that is separate from English, and he will not have
to decide consciously how to greet his teacher when he meets and bows to her.
When this happens, his worldview will have been changed, and he will have a set
of behaviors that is distinct and new. He will never again conceptualize
“greeting” in the same way as when he did not have a sufficient case for greeting
in Japanese.
Having learned a case or a saga in the foreign language they are studying will
change the way learners approach new culture and language knowledge. As
students move from being novice to expert learners of the language, the old
information conditions the new, and the new rehearses the old. This is the
reason for the “first in, last out” phenomenon remarked upon by many veteran
language learners and is a strong argument for accurate culture and linguistic
performances from the beginning of a course of study. The new worldview may
also influence the persona a learner is bringing to the language-learning
experience, creating remarkable changes in the course of learning a foreign
language. A rude student, having compiled a case for politeness in Chinese, may
add that to his persona in the Chinese learning environment, giving the
impression that his initial rudeness was perhaps the result of not having a
sufficient case for politeness in English.

STORY AS THE BASIC UNIT OF ANALYSIS

This is the common situation of all language: expressions do not

mean; they are prompts for us to construct meanings by working
with processes we already know. In no sense is the meaning of an
XYZ metaphor or any utterance “right there in the words.”
When we understand an utterance, we in no sense are
understanding “just what the words say”; the words themselves
say nothing independently of the richly detailed knowledge and
powerful cognitive processes we bring to bear. (Turner 199

42
 Remembering the Future

1:206)

Foreign language teachers have long relied on the sentence as the basic unit of
analysis, presentation, and performance of the language code. When we expand
our focus to include the culturally determined contexts of the language — what
Mark Turner refers to as “richly detailed knowledge” — the story becomes the
basic unit of analysis. In a given communication event, there is more
information in the context than in the message. The sense lies not in the words
but in the interaction of the words with the listeners, with the cultural context,
and with present circumstances.
The story of a given communication event is the knowledge of culture,
context, code, and performance that permits one to participate in that event. If
we assume a conventional structure of memory as including working memory
and long-term memory, stories function in the metabuffer to convert working
memories to long-term memories and long-term memories to default behaviors.
There is evidence that stories exist in the mind independently of other
communicative capacities (Schank 1990). In some cases of physiological injury,
stories may be the only communication functions an individual retains. There
are reported cases in which people remember stories after they have forgotten
words associated with a given domain (Martin and Romani 1995). Using this
general concept of story, we can state that, from excuses to gossip to great
literature, stories convey the knowledge that has or will become privileged by a
culture.

KNOWING THE STORY

To realize the construction of a second-culture worldview in the classroom, the

cycle of compilation and give them means to continue the compilation beyond
their classroom experiences. After all, compilation of culture is a lifelong task
even for first cultures, and our time in the classroom is limited. The classroom
memory we want to establish has two parts: compilation of a target-culture
worldview through a suitable collection of cases and sagas, and the process of
compilation itself. The only way we could hope to build such classroom memory
is performance by performance — and for each performance, step-by-step until
each learner possesses a story of that performance. Throughout this process, the
target culture is the outer shell within which all activities are organized, situated,

43
 Remembering the Future

and evaluated.iii
There are levels of “knowing” a story, ranging from ignorance to automatic
inclination, as illustrated in the well-known progression: (1) don’t know you
don’t know; (2) know you don’t know; (3) know you know, and (4) don’t know
you know.iv Every beginning learner of a foreign language claims to know that
the language they are about to study is different from his or her native language.
Despite such general awareness, American learners are often surprised to learn
that Xiexie, an expression of gratitude in Chinese, is not used in response to a
compliment and that the choice between the “formal” and “informal” endings
in Japanese is not merely a stylistic variation.
The cultural characteristics of some stories are obvious. For example,
Chinese and American stories on how to serve a cup of tea have clearly con-
trasting elements. An American host tries to be polite by giving the guest
options and not imposing on the guest the host’s predictions or assumptions
about what the guest might want. A considerate Chinese host will know that a
good guest would not make overt demands on the host and tries to surmise what
might please the guest even when the guest overtly declines any offers of tea or
another beverage. Most stories that underlie extended and prolonged
communication are not as simple and clearly contrastive between the target and
base cultures as we might think. They require closer attention and greater effort
to learn. To help learners recognize the elements of performance, we show a
demonstration of the performance, whether it be a scene from a movie or an
episode from a novel or a short dialogue prepared for pedagogical purposes, and
we define the constituent elements. Having recognized that the culture they are
studying is different from that of their base culture, learners have reached the
level at which they “know they don’t know.”
Learners can then proceed to the next level of knowing, “know that they
know,” through enactment and role-play activities. Students first imitate the
scripts involved in the performance. The enactment requires much repetition
practice, which can be done outside the classroom provided that students we
need to devise activities through which we can initiate our students into have
easy access to the model performance. They develop memory of language and
culture knowledge through visualization and practice. Pedagogical materials
serve as an important source of language and culture information for this
activity. In classrooms, enactment leads to role-play and monitored simulations.
For simulations, students play specified roles with specified scripts in the

44
 Remembering the Future

specified time and place in front of a specified audience. Unless these elements
are specified, usually by the teacher or the instructional materials, individuals
predominately play the roles of teacher and students. Such defaults ensure the
development of classroom sagas rather than memory that will be more useful in
the target culture. It is crucial that these various elements be specified for the
target culture and that students have the opportunity to engage actively in a
variety of performances of the target culture. This is the only means through
which they will have personal memories of those performances — the stories
that make up the target culture worldview.
Having a memory of a story is an important step along the road to knowing.
The next activity, improvisation, expands the repertoire of stories that students
possess. To start the improvisation, one or more of the performance
components are altered, and students compile new but related stories. If the
script they hear or read changes, they may have to conjecture about changes in
the actor’s perception of the context or in the actor’s intentions. If the time or
roles are altered, students will have to adjust the script they utter or write
accordingly. The teacher’s job is to bring about these alterations in the context
of performance and to monitor the students’ behaviors to discern whether the
stories they are developing are acceptable to members of the target culture.
Teachers can also participate in the performance and react to the students’
performances. Here, the teacher could respond with one of the typical teacher
responses, such as “That was good” or “That is incorrect.” If that is what
happens, that is the story students will remember — that of being praised or
being corrected by the teacher in the classroom. If, on the other hand, the
teacher responds as a member of the target culture would, this reaction is a
memory of the potential story of the future. If the initial performance is not
acceptable, the teacher can provide language information or culture information
necessary to modify the performance. If the story ends there, however, it is just
another story of being corrected by the teacher or, at best, a story of a helpful
teacher. The teacher can go one step further to give the student the opportunity
to engage in a culturally more plausible performance and respond to it as a
member of the culture. This will lead to a memory of a successful interaction (or
interpretation or presentation) in the target culture — the kind of memory that
will help learners navigate through new experiences in the future without the
help of the teacher. Such controlled improvisation should be repeated many
times until students are able to respond to changing contexts automatically.

45
 Remembering the Future

When they can do this, they have reached the highest level of knowing: “they
don’t know that they know.” They can expand their sagas and cases without
conscious analysis or extensive practice, as the well-rehearsed stories have now
become second nature to them, part of their constructed worldview. The
complex and interconnected sagas and cases form the base of target-culture
knowledge structure from which learners can continue their discoveries about
the target language and culture, discoveries that will then feed into the next cycle
of compilation.
In the course of several hundred hours of classroom activities, students will
have gone through this compilation cycle many times. This experience then
leads to memory of the process of compilation, which will stay with learners
beyond classrooms. When they encounter new situations, they are able to
identify the elements of performance, recognize the new elements, incorporate
them into their culture and language knowledge, develop a new story through
performance, compile the new story into the structure of sagas and cases to
adjust their own knowledge structure of the target culture. This equips them to
critique their performances in light of reactions from members of the target
culture as well as from their own knowledge and to seek ways to modify their
story.
The choice and arrangement of stories, sagas, and cases to be developed in a
given program of study must be guided by the level of significance of any given
story in the target culture. All are specific to the target culture. In addition, their
arrangement should foster effective compilation — that is, from simple to
complex and from frequent to infrequent.

REMEMBERING THE FUTURE

This proleptic conceit of remembering the future focuses on the single most
important task confronting a teacher of Chinese or Japanese: giving the language
student the opportunity to create a memory in a pedagogical situation that he or
she can apply to a later opportunity to interact with people from or in China or
Japan. Compiling knowledge of a culture one has not yet experienced firsthand
is a simple notion our field has recognized from the l950s — language and
culture are inseparable. The question confronting those of us in foreign language
study is, which culture is associated with the language being taught in the foreign

46
 Remembering the Future

language classroom — the target culture or the base culture of the student? The
answer to that question depends on how well those of us responsible for foreign
language study formulate the concept of culture for our own purposes.
Culture in foreign language classrooms cannot be demonstrated simply by
commanding information about the practice, perspective, and products of the
target culture. It should go beyond the concept of cultures as sets of topics that
we see in Standards for Foreign Language Learning (SFLL) and directly deal with the
understanding of cultures that shapes the way we use linguistic knowledge. If we
analyze textbooks in terms of their treatment of culture, we cannot be content to
list the reading passages that explain an aspect of the target culture. We should
look instead to see that all instances of language use are tied to target-culture
assumptions and then how those assumptions subtend classroom interactions,
interpretations, and presentations.
Furthermore, being able to recall language knowledge and culture knowl-
edge is not sufficient by itself. Such knowledge must be used to inform
memories of personal involvement in the performance of culture events such as
stories. Thus, performed culture becomes the foundation of a memory that can
be drawn upon when needed in the future. An essay about travel in China makes
an interesting reading about culture. The reader may learn about Chinese train
systems, what to expect in a typical Chinese train, and what people do to
purchase train tickets. However, for the purpose of gaining such knowledge, it is
more efficient and far simpler to read a well-written article in an English
publication. A Chinese artifact, an article about travel from a Chinese
publication, or a video tape about a train trip offer a chance for performed
culture, assuming that students’ reading level frees them from heavy reliance on
bilingual dictionaries. Working too far above their linguistic and culture level,
the students’ memories may focus on their struggle — how difficult and time
consuming a chore it is. Provided they have sufficient language and culture
knowledge, our students can play the roles of people who want to consult the
article to plan a trip. Their interpretation of the article will be framed by the
specified purpose for reading it. Assessment of their comprehension will not be
likely to take the shape of true-or-false questions about every piece of
information in the article but, rather, how well they accomplished their plans.
Finally, and this again takes us beyond the SFLL concept of culture, if we
take performed culture seriously, we cannot be content to observe the under-
standing and performances of our learners, even if they seem to reflect the

47
 Remembering the Future

assumptions of the target culture. We must also evaluate the receptivity of their
performance in the target culture. It should not be enough that they have
conveyed their intentions or comprehended another person’s intentions
successfully. We need to be concerned with how the persons with whom they
interact view the success of the communication. Only when our students are
made aware of the reactions of their interlocutors in the classroom and beyond
will their memory of the future serve them well.

NOTES
i.
To mention a few: Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin. Paul Grice, John
Searle, Edward Sapir. Benjamin Whorf, Lev Vygotsky, Edward T. Hall, John Dewey,
Dell Hymes, Clifford Geertz, G. Lakoff, Eleanor Ochs, Gregory Bateson, Mikhail M.
Bakhtin, Nelson Goodman, Jerome Bruner.
ii.
In 1953 a group of anthropologists, philosophers, and linguists held a
conference on the “interrelations of language and other aspects of culture” (Hoijer
1954: iii), suggesting that language is but an aspect of culture.
iii.
Hector Hammerly (1985:157) proposes a concentric set of cones. the
outermost layer of which is cultural competence. Enclosed in the shell of cultural
competence are communicative competence and linguistic competence.
iv.
This idea of levels of knowing was taken from Robert Smith, an engineer, in a
lecture on creative thinking at Cornell University in the late 1970s. When he
proposed it in his lecture, as a student of Chinese literature I did not think much
about it. When I became more involved in language pedagogy, however, I found
myself using it frequently through the years (Walker).

48
REFERENCES

Dodge, James W. (Ed.). (1972). Other words, other worlds: Language-in-culture.

Reports of the working committees, Northeast Conference on the
Teaching of Foreign Languages. Montpelier: Capital City Press.
Hall, Edward T. (1976). Beyond culture. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.
Hammerly. Hector. (1985). An integrated theory of language teaching and its practical
consequences. Blaine, WA: Second Language Publications.
Hoijer, Harry, ed. (1954). Language in culture: Conference on the interrelations of language
and other aspects of culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Japanese National Standards Task Force. (1998) (draft). Standards for Japanese
language learning. Boulder, CO: Association of Teachers of Japanese.
Lange, Dale L. (1999). Planning for and using the New National Culture
Standards (pp. 57-136). In June K. Phillips (Ed.), Foreign language standards:
Linking research, theories, and practices. ACTFL Foreign Language Education
Series. Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.
Martin, Randi C. and Cristina Romani. (1995). Remembering stories but not
words (pp. 266-84). In Ruth Campbell and Martin A. Conway (Eds.),
Broken memories: Case studies in memories impairment. Cambridge, UK:
Oxford.
National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project. (1996). Standards for
foreign languages learning: Preparing for the 21st century. Yonkers, NY: Author.
Schank, Roger C. (1990). Tell me a story: A new look at real and artificial memory. New
York: Macmillan Publishing.
Schroeder, Pat. (1998). 24 years of house work and the place is still a mess: My life in politics.
Kansas City. MO: Andrews McMeel.
Turner, Mark. (1991). Reading minds: The study of English in the age of cognitive science.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Walker, Galal. (1994). Introduction. Spoken Cantonese: Context and performance
(Kaleidoscope: A course in intermediate to advanced spoken Cantonese, volume 1)
Xiaobin Jian and Matthew Christensen. Co1umbus, OH: The Ohio State
University Foreign Language Publications.
Walker, Galal.（Forthcoming）.Learning to converse in another culture.In Mari
Noda and Patricia J. Wetzel (Eds.), Language in culture: Festschrift in honor of
Eleanor H. Jorden..
Wang, Peter and Shirley Sun. (1986). A great wall. New York: W & S Production.

49
 Remembering the Future

Waugh, Evelyn. (1948). The loved one. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
Wylie, Laurence. (1955). Report of the committee on the place of culture and
civilization in foreign languages and teaching (pp. 1-7) In Germaine Brée
(Ed.), Culture, literature and articulation. Reports of the Working
Committees. Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign
Languages. New York: Northeast Conference on the Teaching of
Foreign Languages.

50