It may be presumptuous to assume that all foreign or second language (L2) teachers agree that language instruction must involve some degree of learning about the culture of the native speakers of the language. However, it is next to impossible to deal with L2 education without taking culture into account. Because the goal of most L2 learning is communication, culture is inevitably involved in the curriculum. Yet, many language teachers are uncertain about what kinds of cultural aspects to include in the curriculum and instruction. In fact, we are sometimes puzzled about why L2 learners find it difficult to comprehend certain linguistic features that seem apparent to native speakers. If you are a language teacher and have ever had to deal with such questions, you will be attracted by the title of this volume. Lange, one of the editors, even asserts that “culture is the driving force in the process and the content of language learning” (p. 272).

Although that position may sound somewhat extreme, the collection of 12 articles in the book—in which are reflected extreme, moderate, and middle-of-the-road positions—is divided into two parts. The first part of the volume, consisting of seven papers, is an outgrowth of the 1991 and 1994 “Interdisciplinary perspectives on culture learning in the second language curriculum” symposia held at the University of Minnesota. The second part of the volume contains five papers presented at the 1996 Minnesota conference on “Culture as the core.” The book's principal asset is its truly interdisciplinary character—the contributing scholars being sociolinguists, applied linguists, anthropologists, intercultural communication specialists, as well as those actively involved in foreign language teaching. Despite such an interdisciplinary nature and despite different positions on the role of culture in L2 teaching and learning, as the editors explicitly state in the introduction, the coherent aim of all the selections is to provide a discussion of L2 learning from the cultural perspective.

The book is enlightening in a variety of ways. For instance, the contrast between “enculturation” (the process by which individuals learn and adopt the ways and manners of culture) and “acculturation” (the process of adapting to a different culture from the one in which individuals were enculturated) in chapters 1 and 3 suggests why some cultural knowledge is explicit and straightforward and thus can be taught directly to L2 learners, whereas other kinds of cultural knowledge are not known at the level of consciousness and are thus implicit, ambiguous, or even elusive. As a result of going through the enculturation process, individuals become able to comprehend the subtleties of conveyed messages. As illustrated in some anecdotes in this volume (pp. 8, 10), L2 learners tend to have difficulty in acquiring cultural assumptions and values coded in the L2. In this way, culture consists of both overt and covert knowledge (chapter 4), which we should be aware of particularly when it comes to cross-cultural communication. Therefore, special care should be taken when covert knowledge is included in curricular materials.

Other noteworthy contrasts related to cross-cultural communication include the relationship between “communicative competence” (chapters 1 and 10) and “intercultural competence” (chapter 2). Through enculturation, individuals gradually acquire the communicative competence required in their native speech community. In L2 contexts, however, learners need to develop a more cross-cultural communicative competence known as intercultural competence. The categorization of cultures into two types—those that tend to derive a great deal of communicative meaning from the context (e.g., Japan) and those where communicative meaning is presumed to be contained in explicit verbal code (e.g., the United States)—suggests that the message delivered by individuals from different cultures may be missed or misinterpreted (chapter 6). I believe that many factors, such as the effects of differing social classes, within a culture complicate the concept of a clear and simple dichotomy of collectivistic and individualistic cultures as described in chapter 6. However, we can probably all agree that cultural instruction in L2 classrooms should focus on developing social awareness and sensitivity across cultures.

In sum, this volume provides a variety of informative ideas from such diverse fields as sociolinguistics and intercultural communication, and readers are provided with much material to help lead to an understanding of the intricate relationships among language, culture, social class, and context in which specific utterances are made. Because the papers are gathered from multiple conferences held at different times and because the symposia themselves brought together teachers and researchers working in various fields, some overlap and different interpretations of the same phenomena and concepts are present. Yet, the volume includes a unique collection of articles that effectively explore various relationships between language and culture.