To begin with, language is a social institution, both shaping and shaped by society at large. Duranti (1997) established that to be part of a culture means to share the propositional knowledge and the rules of inference necessary to understand whether certain propositions are true (given certain premises); and that to the propositional knowledge, one might add the procedural knowledge to carry out tasks such as cooking, answering the phone, giving a formal speech, etc.
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, and that is why teaching culture is so important.
In addition, some of the benefits of teaching language and culture are that it helps to avoid the stereotypes and it enables students to take control of their own learning as well as to achieve autonomy by evaluating and questioning the wider context within which the learning of the target language is embedded.
As a result of the role of language as social practice adopted by linguists during the last decade, new ways of looking at the teaching of language and culture have been suggested. Four lines of thought emerge that consider that culture is a social construct, the product of people's perceptions. These four lines of thought are (Kramsch, 1993):
1. Establishing a sphere of interculturality. Understanding a foreign culture requires putting that culture in relation with one's own.
2. Teaching culture as an interpersonal process. Meaning only appears in discourse, it is relational, and we can highlight cross-cultural aspects.
3. Teaching culture as difference. Even if national characteristics may be isolated, we cannot take them without further specification of other cultural factors such as age, sex, ethnic background, etc.
4. Crossing disciplinary boundaries. We must link out teaching of language and culture to anthropology, to sociology, to semiology, etc.
However, we have to pay special attention to the difference between cultural reality and cultural imagination or stereotypes, which may confuse our students and make the process of teaching culture more difficult because of this intermingling of myth and reality.
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