Communicative language teaching must be intercultural. Cross-cultural communication is not new: as long as people from different cultures have been encountering one another there has been cross-cultural communication. Nowadays, however, the growing globalisation of the world’s economic markets, increased travel opportunities and better communication facilities have created a situation in which people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds need to communicate with each other more often than ever. Although communication across cultures has become very important in our age, only a few English teachers are aware of the fact that their task is not only to teach English, but they also have to increase their students’ cross-curricular awareness. The teachers of English as a foreign language have to teach language with a strong wish of education changing their students’ attitude towards different cultures and different nations.

1. CULTURE IN TEACHING ENGLISH
Applied Linguistics
Presented to : Dr. Khaleel Bataineh
By : Rawan Abu Salimeh
Department of English Language and Translation

2. CULTURE IN TEACHING ENGLISH
Communicative language teaching must be intercultural. Cross-cultural
communication is not new: as long as people from different cultures have been
encountering one another there has been cross-cultural communication.
Nowadays,
however, the growing globalisation of the world’s economic markets, increased
travel opportunities and better communication facilities have created a
situation
in which people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds need to
communicate with each other more often than ever. Although communication
across cultures has become very important in our age, only a few English
teachers are aware of the fact that their task is not only to teach English, but
they also have to increase their students’ cross-curricular awareness. The
teachers of English as a
foreign language have to teach language with a strong wish of education
changing their students’ attitude towards different cultures and different
nations.

3. THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE
1. The cultivation of soil .
2. The training of mind.
3. The totality of socially transmitted behavior
patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions and all other
products of human work and thought.
4. Ways of behavior of a given people.
5. Culture with capital ‘C’ mean formal culture or
achievement culture consisting of literature, fine
arts, music, architecture, etc.
6. culture with ‘small c’ means way of life culture or
behavior culture containing patterns of daily living,
attitudes and values.

4. Hammerly (2001) has designed a scheme in
:
which
there are three categories of culture
1 - Information or factual culture, which refers to
informational facts that an average native speaker
would know about his society, such as geographical
or historical facts.
2 - behavioral culture ,which refers to actual behavior,
such as conversational formulas.
which Hammerly believes is the most essential for
foreign language learning.
3 - Achievement or accomplishment culture, refers to
artistic and literary accomplishments related to
the particular target language group.

5. If we look at the definitions cited above, we can see
that culture, on the one hand is what people
created or achieved: art, music, literature, history
and on the other hand it means the way we develop
for our percept, by which we mean our
belief, value, attitude system, our world view and our
social organizations. 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.

6. THE DOMAINS OF CULTURE
While teaching our students culture we have to deal with
the three
(
which are essential and equally
important
)
domains of culture:
1- The cognitive domain :aims to give information about
other cultures and the learners’ relation to them. We
regard
it as necessary not only to refer to the countries where the
target language is spoken but to include also other
cultures
2- The pragmatic domain :aims the acquisition of the
practical skills needed for intercultural communication.
3- The attitudinal domain: aims to develop attitudes such
as open-mindedness, respect and tolerance and to
avoid stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination.

7. WHAT CULTURE DO WE TEACH?
Whenever civilization is included in school curricula in
Europe and North America only ‘big C’ elements of
British and American culture are emphasized.
These courses contain a lot of pieces of information and
facts about history, geography, institutions, literature, art
and music.
We have to recognize that the subject itself has
broadened. ‘Big C’ (achievement culture) remains as it
was, but little ‘c’ (behavior culture) has been broadened
to include culturally-influenced beliefs and perceptions,
especially as expressed through language, but also
through
cultural behaviors that affect acceptability in the host
community.

8. THE AREAS OF CULTURE

9. THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHING ACHIEVEMENT
CULTURE (‘BIG C’)
Language is a means of multicultural education,
which is part of global education and as
holistic approach is the characteristic feature of
communicative language teaching, it is very
important for language teachers to develop the
students’ personalities, their global, factual
knowledge about the target culture.

10. THE OBJECTIVES OF TEACHING ACHIEVEMENT
CULTURE
The objectives of teaching ‘big C’ are classified to its
basic fields, which are the following:
1. Recognize and explain major geographical
monuments.
2. Recognize and explain major historical events.
3. Recognize and explain major institutions (political,
administrative, religious, etc.)
4. Recognize and explain major ‘artistic monuments’
(architecture, arts, literature, etc.)

11. GOALS OF TEACHING CULTURE
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,
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,
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.

12. We recommend that you keep these seven goals of cultural
instruction in mind as you do your lesson planning, and
that you incorporate them into the following 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’ behavior.

13. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENDING
Source: Sárosdy, Bencze, Poór and Vadnay. 2006. Applied Linguistics I for BA Students in English.