Teaching culture in class

Posgrado en Enseñanza del Ingles como Lengua Extranjera
Universidad de Costa Rica
Enseñanza de la Cultura
Joan Carazo Montoya
INTRODUCTION

Culture has always been present in each country and language around the world. Everybody knows what it means even if they cannot explain it; everyone has heard about it and more importantly, has talked about it. Every single person has traits of his orher culture in his or her life.

But it wasn’t until the “globalization era” that culture became even more noticeable and essential regarding teaching aspects. Nowadays it is fundamental to teach culture when we are teaching a foreign language. Students need to know the cultural differences among countries and must be aware of many details that can make the foreign language easier to acquire.Once someone said “Culture is the Cinderella of the four skills”. This is a quotation Foreign Language teachers must think about because culture is not given the importance it deserves; we need to remember that “teaching language is teaching culture”.

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

“Culture” is defined by the Cambridge University Dictionary as “the way of life, especially thegeneral customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time: youth/working-class culture/ She's studying modern Japanese language and culture.”
The National Center for Cultural Competence defines culture as an “integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thoughts, communications, languages, practices, beliefs, values, customs, courtesies, rituals, manners ofinteracting and roles, relationships and expected behaviors of a racial, ethnic, religious or social group; and the ability to transmit the above to succeeding generations” (Goode, Sockalingam, Brown, & Jones, 2000). Language is not only how we define culture, or it is not only defined by culture; language reflects culture and, which better way to learn culture than through language and vice versa?After the introduction of the Direct Method into the English Language teaching, cultural elements began to be considered as an important aspect of learning the language, and nowadays, cultural background knowledge is a need in teaching language.
As Thanasoulas (2001) points, language teaching is culture teaching, and someone engaged in teaching language is alsoinvolved in teaching culture at the same time. Crystal (1997) also supports this by saying: “Language has no independent existence: it exists only in the brains and mouths and ears and hands and eyes of its user.” This is one of the reasons why there is, of course, a necessity to understand the language itself (language use, grammatical structures, vocabulary, etc) but there is also a need tounderstand how individuals convey all this words; how to use them, how to understand them.
Of course, we left behind the era when first language acquisition and second or foreign language learning were cast in a “behaviouristic mould,” being the products of imitation and language “drills”. Language is no longer thought of as “a pile of rules and strings of words and sentences usedto form propositions about a state of affairs” . In the last two decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of language in relation to society, which has led to a shift of focus from behaviourism and positivism to constructivism to critical theory (see Benson & Voller, 1997: 19-25).
Linguistic competence alone is not enough for learners of a language to becompetent in that language (Krasner, 1999). Language learners need to be aware, for example, of the culturally appropriate ways to address people, express gratitude, make requests, and agree or disagree with someone. They should know that behaviors and intonation patterns that are appropriate in their own speech community may be perceived differently by members of the target language speech...