LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

What Are The Challenges In Teaching Culture Along With Language In The Foreign Language (FL) Classroom?

Language and Culture

Introduction

Foreign language learning is comprised of several components, including grammatical competence, communicative competence, language proficiency, as well as a change in attitudes towards one's own or another culture. For scholars and laymen alike, cultural competence, i.e., the knowledge of the conventions, customs, beliefs, and systems of meaning of another country, is indisputably an integral part of foreign language learning, and many teachers have seen it as their goal to incorporate the teaching of culture into the foreign language curriculum. It could be maintained that the notion of communicative competence, which, in the past decade or so, has blazed a trail, so to speak, in foreign language teaching, emphasising the role of context and the circumstances under which language can be used accurately and appropriately, 'fall[s] short of the mark when it comes to actually equipping students with the cognitive skills they need in a second-culture environment' (Straub, 1999: 2). In other words, since the wider context of language, that is, society and culture, has been reduced to a variable elusive of any definition—as many teachers and students incessantly talk about it without knowing what its exact meaning is—it stands to reason that the term communicative competence should become nothing more than an empty and meretricious word, resorted to if for no other reason than to make an “educational point.” In reality, what most teachers and students seem to lose sight of is the fact that 'knowledge of the grammatical system of a language [grammatical competence] has to be complemented by understanding (sic) of culture-specific meanings [communicative or rather cultural competence]' (Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 4).

One of the misconceptions that have permeated foreign language teaching is the conviction that language is merely a code and, once mastered—mainly by dint of steeping oneself into grammatical rules and some aspects of the social context in which it is embedded—'one language is essentially (albeit not easily) translatable into another' (Kramsch, 1993: 1). To a certain extent, this belief has been instrumental in promoting various approaches to foreign language teaching—pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and communicative—which have certainly endowed the study of language with a social “hue”; nevertheless, paying lip service to the social dynamics that undergird language without trying to identify and gain insights into the very fabric of society and culture that have come to charge language in many and varied ways can only cause misunderstanding and lead to cross-cultural miscommunication.

There is definitely more than meets the eye, and the present paper has the aim of unravelling the “mystery,” shedding some light on the role of teaching culture in fostering cross-cultural understanding which transcends the boundaries of linguistic forms—while enriching and giving far deeper meaning to what is dubbed “communicative competence”—and runs counter to a solipsistic world view. I would like to show that the teaching of culture has enjoyed far less “adulation” than it merits, and consider ways of incorporating it not only into the ...