Cultural Awareness In Language Teaching

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“…One often reads in teachers’ guide-lines that language teaching consists of teaching the four skills ‘plus culture’. This dichotomy of language and culture is an entrenched feature of language teaching around the world. It is part of the linguistic heritage of the profession. Whether it is called (Fr.) civilisation, (G.) Landeskunde, or (Eng.) culture, culture is often seen as mere information conveyed by the language, not as a feature of language itself; cultural awareness becomes an educational objective in itself, separate from language. If, however, language is seen as social practice, culture becomes the very core of language teaching. Cultural awareness must then be viewed both as enabling language proficiency andas being the outcome of reflection on language proficiency”.

Wardhaugh (2002, p.2) defines language to be: a knowledge of rules and principles and of the ways of saying and doing things with sounds, words, and sentences rather than just knowledge of specific sounds, words, and sentences. Language does not exist apart from culture because language is a medium through which culture is expressed in a particular context. Kramsh (1998) argues that the fact that language expresses, embodies and symbolizes cultural reality clearly shows that language and culture are bound together. She also indicates that language as a tool of communication, is “ bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways” ( Kramsh, 1998.p,13).
So if we learn English without its

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