Developing EFL University Students' Cultural Awareness: A Theoretical Account

Abstract

An effective foreign language teaching (henceforth FLT) process usually caters for the development of a set of competences, namely grammatical competence, communicative competence, pragmatic competence, and cultural competence on the part of learners. Cultural competence outlines foreign language (FL) learners' ability to identify themselves with the way of life of the speakers of the FL, i.e. their conventions, customs, beliefs, values, ways of living, etc.. Accordingly, Yang (2005: 28) maintains that the pioneering language teaching theorists Lado, Brooks, Rivers and Chastain have heavily emphasized that understanding the foreign culture should be a demanding aspect of the process of language teaching and learning in general, and that of FLT in particular. Such a viewpoint highlights the fact that language and culture are two complementary elements so intricately interwoven to the extent that one cannot separate the two without losing the significance of either language or culture. In other words, the learning of syntactic structures or new vocabulary and expressions does not suffice unless the FLT process incorporates some cultural elements that are intertwined with language itself (Brown, 2000: 177).