TEACHING CULTURE

PROFESOR: MONICA MLADIN

SCOALA CU CLS. I-VIII THEODOR COSTESCU

Teaching culture is considered important by most teachers but it has remained

"insubstantial and sporadic in most language classrooms" (Omaggio, 1993: 357). Omaggio gives
several reasons for this including lack of time, uncertainty about which aspects of culture to
teach, and lack of practical techniques. In this paper, we shall present a range of practical
techniques that we have found to be successful in culture-based courses and some tips that can
help to make the teaching of culture a better experience for both teachers and students.
There have been points in most teachers' careers when we have stopped to wonder "What am I
actually doing?". Sometimes, filling our students up with all the requisite grammar and
vocabulary, and polishing their pronunciation and honing their communicative skills does not
actually seem to be helping them to achieve the wider goal of being able to genuinely
communicate with and understand the real world outside the classroom at all.
For too long, we have been concentrating on structures and forms and producing materials that
may help our students to have perfect diphthongs or a flawless command of the third conditional
while leaving out anything approaching real, valid, meaningful content. Major ELT publishers
have produced materials so carefully calculated not to offend anyone that they far too often end
up being vacuous if not completely meaningless. If our students are to have any hope of using
their language skills to genuinely comprehend and communicate in the global village, cultural
awareness is crucial.
The main premise of the paper is that effective communication is more than a matter of language
proficiency and that, apart from enhancing and enriching communicative competence, cultural
competence can also lead to empathy and respect toward different cultures as well as promote
objectivity and cultural perspicacity.
Cultural awareness in language learning is often discussed as though it were a fifth skill - the
ability to be aware of cultural relativity following reading, writing, listening and speaking.
Language itself is defined by a culture. We cannot be competent in the language if we do not
also understand the culture that has shaped and informed it. We cannot learn a second language
if we do not have an awareness of that culture, and how that culture relates to our own first
language/first culture. It is not only therefore essential to have cultural awareness, but also
intercultural awareness.

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