The Importance of Culture in Language Teaching and

The Importance of Culture in Language Teaching and its Implications for the Role of Teachers

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Abstract:Understanding and alleviating the influence of culture in a language-learning environment is not simply which a case of ensuring effective communication, it is also imperative to ensure that the students are actually able to learn the language according to their own culturally specific learning methods. Effective communication between student and teacher may not produce the desired results if the learner is unable to incorporate this new knowledge into their existing understanding of the world. This paper is mainly about the element of culture in the process of language teaching. In the meanwhile, the author will present the ideas and examples on its implications for the roles of English teachers.

Key words: culture;language teaching;English teachers

The great importance and significance of the cultural influence in foreign language teaching has been recognised as a result of political globalisation, the globalisation of the English

The Importance of Culture in Language Teaching and its Implications for the Role of Teachers

language in particular consequently, the increasing occurrence of foreign language tutoring. Because of this, many linguists, cultural anthropologists and language teaching experts have studied this topic in recent years, and they produced a valuable body of research that explores many implications of culture for teaching second languages.

In many cases, putting into practise this invaluable cultural awareness is a case of adapting teaching methods and learning resources to suit the cultural worldviews and understanding of the students in the class. Of course, this is the simplest when the students are with the same national culture or one language. Apart from that, the students learning methods can also be altered to suit the students’level of education and formal learning experience.

一、The importance of culture in language teaching

Culture can be expressed by language features such as greetings and refusals, more complex systems of syntax and tense, and every other feature in between. Understandings of class, gender, and formality of setting are expressed in these ways, and the psychological needs of the native speakers are

The Importance of Culture in Language Teaching and its Implications for the Role of Teachers

acknowledged and managed by simple turns of phrase and complex sentence constructions.

An understanding of these cultural needs and impacts are imperative for language teaching has three broad reasons. Firstly, for as reflected in the target language understanding of culture that allows the teacher to describe these mechanisms to students who will not be familiar with them; secondly, an understanding of the students’culture enables him/her to predict the students’problems and make plans to alleviating them; and finally, the students themselves will be unable to retain the language and use it fluently with a limited understanding of the reasons the language existing as it does.

For example, if the native English speakers will teach English in China, it is helpful for them to know that adding more English culture into English teaching is intal. In most parts of China, the students learn English in Chinese atmosphere and they have lack of opportunities to communicate with the native English speakers. Therefore, it is necessary for the English teachers to adapt their methods to suit our situation, they need to teach more English cultures and improve the

students’communicating skills in a practical way in order to give them a vivid picture of UK or other Anglophone countries.

The Importance of Culture in Language Teaching and its Implications for the Role of Teachers

Many foreign language teachers currently find it difficult to provide teaching methods and learning resources that it is the best suit for the cultural background(s) of their students, because of having limited teaching materials at their disposal. Take the majority of Western language textbooks for example, were prepared without proper concerns for the specific needs of non-Western students. Many of the reading material tends to focus on celebrities who are either unknown in the East, or who would be inappropriate topics for discussion (for reasons of political or religious mores).

For example, the British teacher Gillian Gibbons has been jailed for 15 days after insulting Islam's Prophet by allowing her pupils in Sudan to name a teddy bear Muhammad. This is because Sudan is a place where religion is never mocked or satirised, and it is unthinkable that a toy or pet could be given a religious name.

In reality, many second language teachers and students seem to lose their sights of the fact as a result the knowledge of grammatical system of a language [grammatical competence] often has to be complemented by an understanding of

culture-specific meanings [communicative, or rather cultural competence]. (Byram, Morgan, et al., 1994:4)

The Importance of Culture in Language Teaching and its Implications for the Role of Teachers

Failure to provide this complementary study leads to a lack of comprehension on the students’part, or in some cases, worse, and the students’failure to recognise that they have failed to understand the true meanings of the concepts discussed. If Malinowski argues, language maintains its meaning only within the context of the culture that produced it, a lack of knowledge of this culture will certainly lead to a lack of linguistic or semantic understanding.

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