THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHING CULTURE

Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them. (Kramsch, 1993: 1)

Culture and communication are inseparable because culture not only dictates who talks to whom, about what, and how the communication proceeds, it also helps to determine how people encode messages, the meanings they have for messages, and the conditions and circumstances under which various messages may or may not be sent, noticed, or interpreted... Culture...is the foundation of communication.

The spiritual traits and the structure of the language of a people are so intimately blended that, given either of the two, one should be able to derive the other from it to the fullest extent…Language is the outward manifestation of the spirit of people: their language is their spirit, and their spirit is their language; it is difficult to imagine any two things more identical (Humboldt, 1907, cited in Salzmann, 1998: 39).

Before venturing into unknown territories (Grove, 1982), learners must first become conversant with what it means to be part of a culture, their own culture. By exploring their own culture, i.e., by discussing the very values, expectations, traditions, customs, and rituals they unconsciously take part in, they are ready to reflect upon the values, expectations, and traditions of others ‘with a higher degree of intellectual objectivity’ (Straub, 1999). Depending on the age and level of the learners, this task can take many forms. For example, young beginners or intermediate students should be given the opportunity to enjoy certain activities that are part of their own tradition, such as national sports, social festivities, or songs, before setting about exploring those of the target culture. Here, we will only be concerned with the latter. ‘Beginning foreign language students want to feel, touch, smell, and see the foreign peoples and not just hear their language’ (Peck, 1998). At any rate, the foreign language classroom should become a ‘cultural island’ (Kramsch, 1993; Singhal, 1998; Peck, 1998), where the accent will be on ‘cultural experience’ rather than ‘cultural awareness’ (see Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 55-60). From the first day, teachers are expected to bring in the class posters, pictures, maps, and other realia in order to help students develop ‘a mental image’ of the target culture (Peck, 1998). According to Peck (1998), an effective and stimulating activity is to send students on “cultural errands” (my term)—to supermarkets and department stores—and have them write down the names of imported goods. Moreover, teachers can also invite guest speakers, who will talk about their experiences of the foreign country.

It goes without saying that foreign language teachers should be foreign culture teachers, having the ability to experience and analyse both the home and target cultures (Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 73). The onus is on them to convey cultural meaning and introduce students to a kind of learning ‘which challenges and modifies their perspective on the world and their cultural identity as members of a given social and national group’

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