Culture Awareness in foreign language classrooms

Abstract

This paper focuses on the importance of cultural awareness in foreign language teaching. We the foreign language educators, are required to instill in our students, a keen interest in the Sociolinguistic rules and a strong understanding of the contemporary culture of that foreign society to help them achieve complete and relevant communication through their language. It is never enough to emphasize to our Indian students, who being neither equipped with the Sociolinguistic competence of the target foreign language, nor having exposure to its communicative rules, the extreme importance of imbibing the significance of the culture to shape their
learnt language. Their awareness of that culture will eventually give them an innate, if not an almost, spontaneous ability to choose the right words, proverbs and terminologies to express themselves through their language.