Developing Cultural Awareness in Foreign Language Teaching

#CCU 1

From this journal i learned that, cultural awareness is important and needed for the students, because they need to understand and sensitive to other cultures so they will be ready to live more harmoniously in the future. One of the most important aims of culture teaching is to help the learner gain the understanding of the native speaker’s perspective. By having cultural awareness learner will learn how to understand their own cultures, other’s cultures and have positive interest to how they are both different or same. It will increase the tolerance and understanding or even sympathy in social life.

Students have to recognize and identify their own culture and what’s the relation to other, cause it is not only about nationality or language but also about ethnic, religion, age, gender and so on. Galloway (1984) suggest that there are 4 primary categories of understanding. The first is convention which help students understand how other people behave based on thei culture in normal situation includes  extralinguistic behaviors and conventional utterances that are used to perform tasks in context. The second is connotation which is assosiated with word’s meaning from cultural reference. The third is conditioning which is dealing with how to interpret other’s behaviours without making any judgement because it is different from them. The last is comprehension, this category  includes such skills as analysis and tolerance of ambiguity.

Teacher may improve students’ cultural awareness in classroom activity, because it’s such a hidden curriculum that have to teach by the teachers. Language teachers must instruct their students on the cultural background of language usage, choose culturally appropriate teaching styles and explore culturally based linguistic differences to deliver understanding. They will make sure that all of the students in a classrom with the different cultures can understand the dynamic of the cultures. So that they will prevent cultural conflict that caused by missinterpret, ethnocentrism, stereotypes and prejudice.

Source : English Language Teaching Vol. 5, No. 3; March 2012

  Developing Cultural Awareness in Foreign Language Teaching

  by Zahra Ghorbani Shemshadsara