skanowanie0025 (24)

Knowledge about culture and society has been generally recognized as one of the aspects of language teaching. It is treated as a cognitive objective complementing the proficiency objective.

Since language reflects the culture of its speakers, students should be given insight into habits, customs, and values, which are similar to or different from their own. Leaming about cultural diversity provides students with knowledge and skills for morę effective communication in intercultural situations. The morę they know about the different cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes of our neighbours, the better they will be to recognize and to understand the differences in their cultural behaviours. The knowledge of cultural differences and self-knowledge of how we usually respond to those differences can make us aware of hidden prejudices and stereotypes, which are barriers to tolerance, understanding, and good communication.

The cultural behaviour of people from the same country can be referred to collectively as cultural pattems.

A cultural pattern is the collective term to describe a cluster of interrelated cultural orientations. Cultural pattems are madę up of interrelated cultural behaviours, which are influenced by values that are shared by a cultural group.

The common cultural pattems that apply to the entire country represent the dominant culture in a heterogeneous society. It is important to remember that even within a homogeneous society, the dominant cultural pattern does not necessarily apply to everyone living in that society. Our perception of the world does not develop only because of our culture, but many other factors contribute to the development of our individual views. When we refer to a dominant cultural pattern, we are referring to the pattems that foreigners are most likely to encounter. We also need to remember that culture is dynamie and as the needs and values of individuals change, the cultural pattems will also change.

Although communicative competence implies knowledge of various sociocultural aspects (e.g. differences in dialects, choices of register and style), it seems impossible to achieve literacy without acąuiring skills that are called cultural competence.

Cultural competence implies implicit mastery of the norms of society, the unspoken rules of conduct, values, and orientations, which make up the cultural fabrie of a society. It fiirther implies the ability to recognize culturally significant facts, and knowledge of the parameters within which conduct is acceptable or unacceptable. Cultural competence merges into communicative competence.

Nevertheless, cultural competence and communicative competence differ from each other in that the former points to mainly social and cultural behaviour and facts, and less to their linguistic manifestations.

4.2. Cultural goals

Generally speaking, the goals of cultural teaching are cross-cultural understanding and cross-cultural communication. The former implies a detailed analysis that leads to a subseąuent synthesis of the major themes of the culture. The latter, on the other hand, encourages students to experience the foreign culture directly through developing personal relationship with target language community.

The specific goals of culture teaching may be summarized in seven categories:

1.    The sense of culturally conditioned behaviour. The student should demonstrate an understanding that people generally act the way they do because they are using options the society allows for satisfying basie physical and psychological needs.

2.    Interaction of language andj society. The student should demonstrate an understanding that social variables, such as age, sex, social class, and place of residence, affect the way people speak and behave.

3.    Knowledge how to behave in common situations. The student should indicate an understanding of the role convention plays in shaping behaviour by demonstrating how people act in common and crisis situations in the target culture.

51