Culture In English Teaching

The paper is concerned with the contribution and incorporation of the teaching of culture into the English teaching classroom. More specifically, some consideration will be given to the why and how of teaching culture. It will be demonstrated that teaching a foreign language is not tantamount to giving a homily on syntactic structures or learning new vocabulary and expressions, but mainly incorporates, or should incorporate, some cultural elements, which are intertwined with language itself. Furthermore, an attempt will be made to incorporate culture into the classroom by means of considering some techniques and methods currently used. The main premise of the paper is that effective communication is more than a matter of language proficiency and that, apart from enhancing and enriching communicative competence(especially intercultural communicative competence), cultural competence can also lead to empathy , cultural awareness and strategies toward different cultures as well as promote objectivity and cultural perspicacity.