The Cultural Component of Language Teaching

The current interest in the role of culture in language teaching is due to a number of factors, political, educational, ideological. Both in Europe and in the U.S., albeit for different reasons, there is a great deal of political pressure now put on foreign language educators to help solve the social and economic problems of the times. Educators fear that the mere acquisition of linguistic systems is no guarantee of international peace and understanding. After years of communicative euphoria, some language teachers are becoming dissatisfied with purely functional uses of language. Some are pleading to supplement the traditional acquisition of "communication skills" with some intellectually legitimate, humanistically oriented, cultural "content". Others, who teach their language to non-native speaker immigrants, are under pressure to absorb (read: acculturate) into their society growing numbers of newcomers. And there is of course the recrudescence of nationalism around the world that draws political capital from increased links between national languages and national cultures. The reasons for the growing "culturalisation" of language teaching are many, the motives often contradictory