What is Culture and why should it be taught?

Culture is a big word that involves all the activities linked to human life. Over the past 50
years a large number of definitions have appeared but there is not a common definition that
satisfy everybody or they agreed about it. So probably this is the first obstacle for teachers
when thinking about teaching culture and probably the best thing to do about this subject is
to understand the holistic nature of culture and not only try to categorize culture in terms of
Arts, History, etc.
Anyway there are some definitions that maybe can give us a good idea to what is important
to consider at the time to implement culture in teaching languages. Brown (2007) define
culture as the ideas, customs, skills, arts, tools which characterize a given group of
people in a given period of time and Moran (2001) defines culture as the evolving life
of a group of persons, consisting of a shared set of practices associated with a shared set of
products, based upon a shared set of perspectives on the world, and set within specific
social contexts. The best way to
The link between foreign language learning and culture learning has been established by
the linguists and anthropologists a long time ago. So the importance of culture in language
learning is unquestionable because culture and language are glued to each other and there is
no way to understand and be proficient in a language without understand and grasp the
basics of that culture. Language expresses, embodies and symbolizes cultural reality
And while it may generally be accepted in the language-teaching community that culture is
an integral part of language instruction, there is little common ground on what, much less
how, we should teach it. Even with superior knowledge of the grammatical structure of a
language, and mastery of a large basic vocabulary, without cultural competence to give
relevant meaning and significance to otherwise "correct" utterances, communication does
not occur.
The question that remains and we really need to address as teachers now is how to teach
culture and which are the best way to do it.

Here are some of the main reasons that culture should to be taught along with the language
basic skills:
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Students cannot truly master the language until they have also mastered the cultural

contexts in which the language occurs.

Language is an important part of our lives. It is a uniquely human gift which lets us
communicate. But language is much more than just a means of communication. It is

also an inseparable part of our culture.

Culture is a major and inseparable component of knowing a language, it is also one
of the most enjoyable aspects of acquiring a new language and keeping yourself

motivated.
The political, social and economic conditions of a country influence its vocabulary
and the shades of meaning of its words.

In that way we are not just supposed to be bilingual but bicultural and specially in this 21 st.
century when the world became digital, we have many ways and opportunities to get closer
to every culture on the planet and enriching our language learning for the best.