Teaching L2 Culture

In your view, what is culture? Is it important to teach L2 culture? Why? Is it possible to teach L2 culture in the classroom setting? What are the limitations? How should culture be learned or taught? Use examples to support your points of view. 

Culture is one of these terms that many might find easy to understand, but hard to put into words. I would define culture as the collective art, customs, and institutions of a particular group of people - basically, if it is a defining characteristic of native L2 speakers, you can file it under culture. An L2's culture can be a motivating factor for many students to study a second language in the first place, so I think it is important that teachers incorporate culture into their lesson plans as best they can. 

Teaching culture is an important, but also challenging aspect of foreign language teaching. I think that teaching culture should start early on in language courses, even if it is as simple as the teacher relaying her/his personal experiences to the class through short anecdotes. Most language teachers should have plenty of personal stories about their experiences in the target culture to share with the class. In my own teaching, I found that most often I would not need to have anything planned the mention something cultural in class. A story would come arise organically from the lesson plan for the day. As long as these types of asides do not bring the class off track, a personal story about the L2 culture helps to keep the class lively and engaging for the student. A 1-2 minute break from a lesson on grammar is usually welcome.

Culture teaching can also be placed more deliberately into language curriculum by including authentic cultural material into lessons plans. For example, a teacher could use poetry, music, or other authentic works of art to teach a certain grammar point or create a listening/reading comprehension lesson. These types of lessons would then accomplish two things at once - helping students to acquire the L2 while at the same time learning about C2. When appropriately integrated into classroom learning, I think showing films in the L2 is also a great idea once students obtain at least intermediate listening skills. Almost all of my German teachers from throughout my life took special advantage of film to teach both culture and listening comprehension. I would even argue that my language classes made me appreciate the medium of film on a much deeper level than I previously had, because lessons based around films would force me to think critically and analyze film in a way that I hadn't before. Even if students are not able to discuss films completely in the L2, I think the cultural value of certain films in language learning can make language learning much more fun and help foster a lifelong interest in the L2.

There are of course limitations to teaching culture in the classroom and no lesson on culture can quite compare to actually being immersed in the C2. Although a language teacher can offer some limited exposure to the target culture, a language learner would ultimately learn more about the culture by experiencing it themselves. That is not to say that teachers should ignore culture completely though. Language instruction that connects the learning of a language to authentic materials produced in that language is most certainly valuable and should not be ignored in the less-than-ideal setting of the classroom.