Once we have spoken about the different methods that surround language teaching and we have clarified the concept of language and its different implications, its time to make an overview around an important factor that we have to take into account when teaching a foreign language, the culture.
Cultural competence, the knowledge of the conventions, customs, beliefs, and systems of meaning of another country, is indisputably an integral part of Foreign Language Learning (FLL).
We cannot go about teaching a foreign language without at least offering some insights into its speakers' culture. By the same token, we cannot go about fostering communicative competence without taking into account the different views and perspectives of people in different cultures which may enhance or even inhibit communication. After all, communication requires understanding, and understanding requires stepping into the shoes of the foreigner and shifting his/her cultural baggage, while always “putting the target culture in relation to one's own” (Kramsch, 1993).
Would you like to learn some more about it?
Throughout the next posts we will first analyse the language barrier and some of the reasons of the importance of foreign language and international communication. Afterwards, we will go through the interests in language diversity by getting to know a new language and its culture. At the end, we will talk about the history of culture teaching, the importance of teaching language and culture together and the development of the “cultural awareness” in the educational system now a days.
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