Foreign Language Literature Review

Session seven

Elham Qiyasi

Literature review

1. Interaction between Culture and Foreign Language learning

Brown (1994) describes the relation between language and culture as follows: “A language is a part of a culture and a culture is a part of a language; the two are intricately interwoven so that one cannot separate the two without losing the significance of either language or culture” (cited in Jiang, 2000: 328).

Therefore in order to understand the foreign language properly one should be familiar with the culture of that language as well. Moreover if a person learns a foreign language without its culture, he or she is exactly like a “fluent fool” Bennett (1993) which means someone who can speak the new language fluently but does not understand

Teaching culture in the foreign language classroom

According to Gao (2006), since language learning and cultural learning are strongly dependent to each other and we cannot learn them separately, it is the teachers’ rule to be aware of the importance of culture studies in foreign language classroom and try to increase students ' cultural awareness. Therefore the teachers need to have cultural knowledge about the language they want to teach and try to combine culture in their classrooms in order to teach a new language to students.

Furthermore, as Wei (2005) suggests, the first step to teach culture is to make students aware of their own culture instead of spreading and teaching target culture in classroom. Since when students study about their own culture, they may be more aware of cultural differences and also they will keep their cultural identity in cross-cultural communication. Besides, the teachers should have the ability to experience and analyze both the home and target cultures (Byram, Morgan and Colleagues,

For instance one of the problem is that since the study of culture requires time; therefore, many teachers feel they cannot spare time for teaching foreign language culture in their overcrowded syllabus. Most of them think that students will learn target culture later after they have learned grammar and vocabulary of the target language. However, this ‘later’ never seems to come for most students. Another problem is that teachers may feel that they don’t have enough knowledge on the target culture, and they afraid of making mistake in this field thus they don’t teach the culture to their