The Importance of Teaching Culture in the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

Language is not only the product of culture, but also is the symbol of culture’’ (Gleason, 1961). Understanding the nature of the relationship between language and culture is fundamental matter in language teaching. In order to interpret language within a cultural framework, teaching culture should be at the heart of teaching a foreign language. This is because the essential aim of teaching a foreign language is achieving high levels of intercultural communicative competence. In doing so, integration between grammar, phonology, lexis and culture should be obtained. This paper addresses the concepts of language and culture while examining the relationship between them. In addition, it covers some disciplines which focus on the interaction of language and culture such as sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics.  After that, the paper suggests some teaching strategies to enable learners to bridge the culture gap, and hence, achieve a high standard in foreign language acquisition.