To Culture or not to Culture, that is the Question!

Yıl 2016, Cilt: 5 Sayı: 3, 218 - 233, 18.10.2016

Ömer Gökhan Ulum

Öz

Simply, culture might be described as a way of life or everything that a society forms and develops over its history. Since culture and language are seen to be inseparable, language teaching courses are supposed to contain some cultural elements. Considering this issue, language teaching curriculums are expected to cover cultural compounds from the target culture. The study was carried out through quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. Based upon a comparative descriptive research design, the present study aimed to deal with cultural compounds by explaining the views of language teachers from different language majors and found out that though there are similarities and differences of perceptions on which cultural elements should be taken into account in language education, these cultural elements are seen to be of high significance to be often included in language learning process. Besides, regarding the use of cultural compounds in foreign language education, it was also found out that mostly there is a difference between the perceptions of English/German/French as a foreign language teacher and Turkish/Arabic as a foreign language teacher (western vs. eastern). The results obtained from this comparative descriptive study may supply valuable help for course book authors, program designers, instructors, and policy makers in terms of containing cultural elements in the course contents, and materials.

Keywords: culture, language, language and culture, cultural elements