Response journal entry #4: Introduction of Culture and Second Language

Teaching Culture in Second Language is a very good approach to integrate language proficiency, as well as a change in attitudes towards one’s own or another culture from the very beginning of the English learning process. It will provide very good suggestions for helping foreign learners at all levels developing communicative competence, as well as a change in attitudes towards their own or another culture.
We as teachers need to be creative to explore different topics that will help students to start making comfortable with the target culture, therefore focus on alternative methods or some teaching strategies to provide with opportunities for practice, and given focused feedback on their performance before and during the process of learning a new culture, for instance: “to discover how much freedom the target language allows learners to manipulate grammatical forms, sounds, and meanings, and to reflect upon, or even flout, socially accepted norms at work both in their own or the target culture” (Radical Pedagogy, 2001), so we as instructors can make a difference to incorporate the teaching of culture into a valuable and effective foreign language curriculum.
Therefore, the knowledge the student may start to perceive (in relation to customs, beliefs, and systems of meaning of another country) will be definitely an integral part of foreign language learning.