APPLIED LINGUISTICS for BA Students in English
CULTURE IN TEACHING ENGLISH
Goals of teaching culture
The following goals are a modification of Ned Seelye's, seven goals of cultural instruction. In Teaching Culture, Ned Seelye (1988) provides a framework for facilitating the development of cross-cultural communication skills.
According to Seelye the seven goals of teaching culture are:
1. to help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people exhibit culturally-conditioned behaviors,
2. to help students to develop an understanding that social variables such as age, sex, social class, and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave,
3. to help students to become more aware of conventional behavior in common situations in the target culture,
4. to help students to increase their awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in the target language
5. to help students to develop the ability to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture, in terms of supporting evidence,
6. to help students to develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture,
7. to stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people.
We recommend that you keep these seven goals of cultural instruction in mind as you do your lesson planning, and that you incorporate them into the following practical teaching principles:
1. Access the culture through the language being taught.
2. Make the study of cultural behaviors an integral part of each lesson.
3. Aim for students to achieve the socioeconomic competence which they feel they need.
4. Aim for all levels to achieve cross-cultural understanding awareness of their own culture, as well as that of the target language.
5. Recognize that not all teaching about culture implies behavior change, but merely an awareness and tolerance of the cultural influences affecting one’s own and others’ behavior.
