Nowadays, researchers claim that foreign language learning is comprised of several
components, including grammatical competence, communicative competence, language
proficiency, as well as a change in attitudes towards one’s own or another culture. For
scholars and laymen alike, cultural competence, i.e., the knowledge of the conventions,
customs, beliefs, and systems of meaning of another society, is indisputably an integral
part of foreign language learning. This assumption seems to fit well with Bachman’s view
(quoted in Brindley) of language competence – that language competence comprises not
only language knowledge but also pragmatic competence, of which cultural knowledge is a
part.
With this view, educators in Vietnam have made it apriority to incorporate the teaching of
culture into the classroom curricula. Cultural knowledge is one of the three goal areas of
English Language Instruction in schools:
“To enable students to become aware of their own culture and/ or cross-cultural
differences in order to be better overall communicators and to better inform the world of
the Vietnamese people, their history and culture.” (“Curriculum goals for English
Language Instruction in Vietnamese schools”, 1999)
But how can we “teach” culture to the non-major students in Vietnam who usually do not
have close contact with native speakers of English and have little opportunity to discover
how these speakers think, feel and interact with others in their own peer group? How can
we stimulate their curiosity about the target culture when, sometimes, they do not even
have sufficient time to learn the formal properties of the language? One of the ways of
doing so should be by applying culture-based activities, which focus on culturally
behaviours arising out of the language material being study, so that students can be helped
to move beyond the classroom into the living culture of English-speaking countries.