The need to develop students' intercultural competence and the status of English language as a lingua franca have become established areas of research and discussion in the ELT world. However, neither have made much of an impact on the way that the language is marketed and sold to the wider world nor, generally speaking, on the cultural content of today's ELT materials.

If you are studying British English today, chances are that the iconic representations of the red bus, telephone box, Big Ben and the Union Jack will crop up at some point either in the materials that you use or the advertising of the school where you study. Although changes are afoot, such anachronistic images of Britishness still prevail and, to a certain extent, help reinforce native speakers' ownership of the language. For example, the cover of the BBC English Plus course (recently offered to readers of Spain's El País newspaper) features two red telephone boxes next to what looks like the British Museum. It describes itself as 'the English course of the 21st century' which - alongside these clichéd images - is almost laughable.

Red telephone boxes from cover of El País / BBC DVD English Course

For the adult course Framework which I worked on, license owners of the book in Greece decided to make some editorial changes for this market, placing a photo of Big Ben on the cover and adding cultural pages on UK sights and customs. So, at least for some clients, there seems to be a clear expectation, that when studying a language the learner will also want to be immersed in its “corresponding culture”, however stereotypical, monolithic and unrepresentative the images of this culture may be. Interestingly, mass reproduction has neutered these images to that extent that we don't notice or are immune to their power. Yet their subliminal effect is undeniable.

I will look at this issue from two perspectives: 1) The cultural content of ELT materials and 2) The marketing of English. I will then outline an alternative approach in 3) A way forward.

1) The cultural content of ELT materials
In a recent British Council report, it was discovered that students wanted to learn English in an international, business or social context, rather than with reference to British culture: “There's much less interest in the red telephone boxes and black London taxis in text books, or in English learning that has a close relationship with the UK” the report concluded. And yet, as we have seen, the red telephone box still does appear with alarming regularity.

Banksy, Bleeding Post Box

Apart from these stereotypical images, there are others prevalent in many ELT texts which help transmit 'the positive image of speaking English'. The smiley faces and elements of aspirational culture – coursebook characters tend to be rich, successful and superficial – are part and parcel of the way that speaking English has become in itself a status symbol and a marker of social class. And we can see this by casting a critical eye at the images in these books as John Gray has done in an extended study on the subject: “The summoning gaze of the represented participants and the sensory orientation of much of the artwork combine to hail students to a lifestyle in which the discourses of success, mobility and egalitarianism form the basis of the promotional promise of English”.

In a sense the dominant paradigm for many ELT materials would seem to be a surface or essentialist treatment of target culture, in which aspirational role models take centre stage. An alternative would be to foreground a more intercultural model, in which the images presented reflect global, local as well as target culture, and thus reflect today's reality to a greater extent.

2) The marketing of English
Learners of a language are inspired to study it for a variety of reasons: professional, academic, for travel, etc. and the images that language schools and institutions project in order to sell 'language as product' can be revealing of how it is generally viewed by society. Indeed, English is sold much as any other product, using a number of tried and tested techniques such as: embarrassment (at lack of knowledge or sounding foreign), a sense of guilt (for speaking L1), status (the need to adapt to a superior model), and associations of culture and language (reinforcing the native speaker's dominance). The examples below use some of these techniques but, in some cases, also offer rather anachronistic images and ideas about language learning.

The marketing of English also has a lot to do with the image of the language in a particular society. In the adverts from the above countries we can see that English is viewed as a way to gain entrance into a more privileged sector of society. However, in some countries, the elevated status of English is actually regarded as an obstacle to social success and integration rather than a means to achieve it. In the Philippines, the www.english-is-cool.org website attempts to convince the country's youth to be proud to be bilingual.

3) A way forward: Promoting a third space
The image of English presented here suggests that the language inhabits a space culturally associated with the native speaker and which is open only to the select few. Once you have learned it 'properly' you can gain access to this special group. Until then, you could be easily ridiculed: take the English manager Fabio Capello and how he was welcomed by the British press when taking over the post: “At the moment, my English is not so well,” the saviour of British football told a rapt audience, 'so I prefer to be in Italian'. Fabio Capello managed three faltering sentences in the tongue of his new national team before turning to his interpreter…”
Although attempts to promote Global English may be starting to appear, packaging English in this way - by associating it with a particular country and its population - is obviously a lot easier. Ruth Wajnryb calls this the 'invariant, all-purpose Native Speaker Package'… which 'turns language into a manageable, indeed a marketable product. Instead of a fragile, impressionable, context-qualified phenomenon with blurred edges, language is now more like a discrete item on a shop-shelf”.

Rather than asking students to merely buy into this package, an alternative would be to invite them to occupy their own, 'third space'. This would be a flexible model of English open to learner appropriation and emergent forms. The notion of a third space comes from Claire Kramsch: “learners seek out a personal space where two worlds exist simultaneously… (here) they will make their own meanings and relevances, often challenging the established educational canons of both native and target cultures”

In this way, learners become free to create their own image of English. Implications for the classroom are that we should source more texts and images that avoid stereotyping, anachronism and aspirational settings. At the heart of intercultural competence is the need for students to reflect on their own language and culture and find differences and similarities between this and the target. In my opinion, an example of a text which does just that is “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers” a novel in the form of a diary by Xiaolu Guo which, among other things, includes interesting observations about both Chinese and English: “Chinese, we not having grammar. We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language. But English language is boss of English user”

Ben Goldstein has taught English for twenty years in Spain, currently as an online tutor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona. His works include the methodology handbook 'Working with Images' (CUP) and the adult course 'Framework' and 'New Framework' (Richmond Publishing).