Language and Culture are Inseparable

The thesis is concerned with the contribution and incorporation of the teaching of culture into the foreign language classroom. More specifically, some consideration will be given to the why and how of teaching culture. It will be demonstrated that teaching a foreign language is not tantamount to giving a homily on syntactic structures or learning new vocabulary and expressions, but mainly incorporates, or should incorporate, some cultural elements, which are intertwined with language itself. Furthermore, an attempt will be made to incorporate culture into the classroom by means of considering some techniques and methods currently used. The main premise of the paper is that effective communication is more than a matter of language proficiency and that, apart from enhancing and enriching communicative competence, cultural competence can also lead to empathy and respect toward different cultures as well as promote objectivity and cultural perspicacity.

Intercultural Horizons Volume III Intercultural Competence—Key to the New Multicultural Societies of the Globalized World , 2015

In response to the realization of the need to develop cultural awareness and intercultural communication competence, recent trends in education policy and pedagogy in the U.S. and the EU have sought to integrate more culture into foreign language curricula. While the theoretical foundations of this trend are accepted as indisputable, the paper takes issue with the continued separate treatment of language and culture in the classroom and, especially, any preferential treatment of culture over language. Rather than culture being at the core of foreign language education, the paper argues that language should be at the core of intercultural education (IE). After outlining the basic tenets and insights of the culture movement in foreign language pedagogy and second language acquisition, the paper builds upon watershed scholarship (e.g. Claire Kramsch, Michael Byram and Milton and Janet Bennett) to introduce an over-arching framework for developing cultural awareness and intercultural communication competence, while maintaining the centrality of language and therefore the need to develop both linguistic and communicative competence in the foreign language. The model is intended solely as an example for what might be developed from the bottom-up in various educational contexts, and not as a universal prescription for teaching language and culture concurrently. Keywords: Communicative Competence, Cultural Awareness, Intercultural (Communication) Competence, Interactive-Communicative Approach, Foreign Language Pedagogy

Philippine Humanities Review, 2017

Recent explorations of the impact of globalization on the development of foreign language (FL) instructional materials invite us to revisit the meaning and purpose of ‘culture’ in foreign language teaching, as the complex nature of the term may entail widely divergent applications in policy and classroom practice. In the Philippines, learning about culture features heavily in educational policies and rationales on FL. However, incorporating cultural and intercultural content into instructional materials and FL pedagogy remains a challenge for local educators, whose very profession entails mediating between the foreign and the local, the self and the other, and the teaching of language skills and cultural content. This study critically examines these intersections and argues for the role of local educators as creators of language instructional materials that not only reinforce grammar lessons, but also reflect upon intercultural points of encounter and facilitate continuity in the cu...

The Modern Language Journal, 2010

This paper is a report on the results of action research undertaken in university EFL classrooms. While the necessity of "learner centering" and the inclusion of culture in foreign language education have been recognized in theory, the research reveals that these considerations have not been effectively brought into practice. I became aware of this when I studied Spanish as a foreign language, and was again confronted with the problem when I began to teach EFL. The lack of intercultural involvement in language education disturbed me to the point that I designed an introductory EFL course specifically for the learners I was working with and focusing on culture. I then employed this course as the "medium" of classroom-based research to learn about the participants" perceptions of the experience. The results of this research offer extraordinary insights into learners" assessments of the significance of learning about culture when learning a foreign language.

This study was conducted with the participation of the students of the ELT department of Çukurova University in Turkey. We have tried to find out what students think about the effects of the culture class they attended in the fall semester of 2003-2004 academic year. As a result of the study, a significant similarity between the students' views and the theoretical benefits of a culture class as argued by some experts in the field was observed. Regarding the benefits of learning about culture, attending the culture class has raised cultural awareness in ELT students concerning both native and target societies. This study illustrates how arguments of language teaching experts in favour of a culture class in language learning and teaching are justified by some sound evidence provided by the participants of this study. Introduction The dialectical connection between language and culture has always been a concern of L2 teachers and educators. Whether culture of the target language is to be incorporated into L2 teaching has been a subject of rapid change throughout language teaching history. In the course of time, the pendulum of ELT practitioners' opinion has swung against or for teaching culture in context of language teaching. For example, during the first decades of the 20th century researchers discussed the importance and possibilities of including cultural components into L2 curriculum (Sysoyev & Donelson, 2002); the advent of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in the late 70s marks a critical shift for teaching culture, for the paradigm shift from an approach based largely on form and structure to a plurality of approaches causing an unintended side effect: the negligence of culture (Pulverness, 2003). Recent studies focus on the seamless relationship between L2 teaching and target culture teaching, especially over the last decade with the writings of scholars such as Byram (

In foreign language education, the teaching of culture remains a hotly debated issue. What is culture? What is its relation to language? Which and whose culture should be taught? What role should the learners' culture play in the acquisition of knowledge of the target culture? How can we avoid essentializing cultures and teaching stereotypes? And how can we develop in the learners an intercultural competence that would shortchange neither their own culture nor the target culture, but would make them into cultural mediators in a globalized world? This paper explores these issues from the perspective of the large body of research done in Australia, Europe and the U.S. in the last twenty years. It links the study of culture to the study of discourse (see, e.g., and to the concept of translingual and transcultural competence proposed by the Modern Language Association (e.g., . Special attention will be given to the unique role that the age-old Persian culture can play in fostering the cultural mediators of tomorrow.

Adelante- Ahead 2018, 2018

Abstract: Language plays a crucial role not only in the construction of culture but also in the emergence of cultural changes. The possibility of changing the attitudes of people by giving them a new vocabulary to build social realities whether national, gender or racial realities that allow them to access to opportunities to develop and use language to communicate and create relationships. This article presents a literature review about the role of culture in teaching a foreign language taking into account some pedagogical and didactic aspects involved in the teaching process. As the main result, it is concluded that it is impossible to teach a language without teaching the culture; the teacher becomes a mediator between foreign languages and culture, that is why certain aspects of teaching can influence the inclusion or exclusion of that elements in a foreign language classroom. Keywords: culture, foreign language teaching, intercultural teaching resources

The Modern Language Journal, 2010

Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, 2015

This research investigates how foreign language (FL) learners (learners of German) view culture instruction in their L1 (English) and whether, or to what extent, the use of their L1 enhances their understanding of the German language and culture(s). In German language classes, the ways native speakers (NSs) of German verbalize affection are often addressed early on when engaging students in conversations about their family, friends, or personal relationships. Using the example of lessons on the meaning and use of German expressions of affection and friendship at the introductory level, this study addresses three areas of inquiry: (a) how students perceive the use of the L1 and L2 in lessons pertaining to culture, (b) whether students prefer the L1 or the L2 when learning about culture in class, and (c) to what extent the use of the L1 affects students' understanding of culturally connoted expressions in German.