Cross Cultural Understanding - Culture and Foreign Language Teaching

Relation between language and culture when studying a foreign language.

 

Dwyer (1996) states about the incorporation of culture into the Foreign Language Curriculum.

Language teachers have been at the business of incorporating cultural information into their foreign language classes, long before it became popular to do so. While these teachers may not have used the term culture, they are certainly aware of the fact that one does not communicate in a foreign language by grammar and vocabulary alone. Yet now that experts are suggesting that teachers add “culture” to their language classrooms the situation becomes problematic because it is not really clear what this means in practice. (Dwyer, 1996).

Language and culture have different meanings. Teachers combine language and culture into foreign language teaching to facilitate teaching foreign languages to their students. By teaching language and culture, it can make it easier for students to talk to foreigners, and it can also add knowledge of language and culture to students.

The teacher teaches foreign languages and culture, when there is a word or sentence that shows a cultural understanding in foreign language lessons. For example, in the reading text there is the phrase "Happy Valentine's Day" which means a day of love which is usually celebrated in western countries.

References

Riyanti, Rahayu Dwi and Darminah, and Chandrawati, Titi and Arifin, Tajul (2013) Cross Cultural Understanding. In: What Is Culture. Universitas Terbuka, Jakarta, pp. 1-34. ISBN 979011057X

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Dwyer, Davis, Antonia Schleicher and Lioba Moshi, 1996, The role of culture: In the language classroom, __

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Wierzbicka, Anna, 1992, Emotion, Language , and Cultural Script, in Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Rose Markus, Emotion and Culture: empirical studies of mutual influence, American Psychological Association, Washington.

______________, 1997, Understanding cultures through their key words, Oxford University Press, New York.

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