2. 9. Culture in Teaching
English
Communicative language teaching must be
intercultural.
The growing globalization of the world’s economic
markets created a situation in which people from
different linguistic and cultural backgrounds need to
communicate with each other more often than ever.
The teachers of English as a foreign language have
to teach language with a strong wish of education
by changing their students’ attitude towards
different cultures and different nations.
3. 9.1 The definition of culture
Hammerly (2001) has designed a scheme
in which there are three categories of
culture:
1. Information or factual culture,
2. Behavioral culture,
3. Achievement or accomplishment culture.
4. from Hammerly definitions cited above, we
can see that:
Culture is what people created or achieved: art,
music, literature, history and on the other hand it
means the way we develop our percept by which
we mean our belief, value, attitude system, our
world view and our social organizations.
5. 9.2 The domains of culture
1. The cognitive domain
2. The pragmatic domain
3. The attitudinal domain
6. 9.3 What culture do we
teach?
In Europe and America only emphasized in ‘big
C’.
The ‘big C’ (achievement culture) contains a lot
of pieces of information and facts about history,
geography, institutions, literature, art and music.
Meanwhile the ‘little C’ (behavior culture) has
been broadened to include culturally-influenced
beliefs and perceptions.
8. The objectives of teaching ‘Big C’
(achievement culture)
1. Recognise and explain major geographical
monuments.
2. Recognise and explain major historical
events.
3. Recognise and explain major institutions
(political, administrative, religious, etc.).
4. Recognise and explain major ‘artistic
monuments’ (architecture, arts, literature,
etc.).
9. The importance of teaching
behaviour culture (‘small c’)
1. It is ‘small c’ that students meet in the
target country every minute and that is
why we have to provide them with a taste
of the lifestyle of the target nation.
2. To help them how to survive in a foreign
country.
10. The concepts of the third area of
culture
Religious beliefs will be reflected in pieces of
music, in literature and in music.
The same religious belief will give explanation
to the eating habits of a nation, e.g. Muslims
and Jews do not eat pork.
11. Why to teach culture?
We have to teach culture so that students can
have information above cultural facts and this
way they can get familiar with the cognitive
domain of culture.
Students can understand the behavior of the
people living in the target country. This is the way
how students learn the pragmatic domain of
culture.
12. 9.5. Goals of teaching culture
According to Seelye the seven goals of teaching
culture are:
1. to help students to develop an understanding of
the fact that all people exhibit culturally-
conditioned behaviours,
2. to help students to develop an understanding
that social variables such as age, sex, social
class, and place of residence influence the
ways in which people speak and behave,
13. 3. to help students to become more aware of
conventional behaviour in common situations in
the target culture,
4. to help students to increase their awareness of
the cultural connotations of words and phrases
in the target language
5. to help students to develop the ability to
evaluate and refine generalizations about the
target culture, in terms of supporting evidence,
14. 6. to help students to develop the necessary skills
to locate and organize information about the
target culture,
7. to stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity about
the target culture, and to encourage empathy
towards its people.
15. Practical teaching principles:
1. Access the culture through the language being
taught.
2. Make the study of cultural behaviors an integral
part of each lesson.
3. Aim for students to achieve the socioeconomic
competence which they feel they need.
4. Aim for all levels to achieve cross-cultural
understanding awareness of their own culture, as
well as that of the target language.
5. Recognize that not all teaching about culture
implies behavior change, but merely an awareness
and tolerance of the cultural influences affecting
one’s own and others’ behaviour.
1. which refers to informational facts that an average native speaker would know about his society, such as geographical or historical facts. 2. which refers to actual behaviour, such as conversational formulas, which Hammerly believes is the most essential for foreign language learning. 3. refers to artistic and literary accomplishments related to the particular target language group.
This second category had stronger influence on the former one since our value- and attitude system, the way we see the world around us shapes our creation.