English has gained its great popularity in Vietnam, a country attempting to develop her technological capacity and to increase her participation in the global processes. For many people in Vietnam, English is seen as one of very necessary means to get a good job. Thus, there is a growing demand to learn this language for communication.
We have been concentrating on structures and forms and producing materials that may help our students to have perfect diphthongs or a flawless command of the third conditional while leaving out anything approaching real, valid, meaningful contents. If our students have any hope of using their language skills to communicate in the global village, cultural awareness is crucial. Therefore, language teachers should realize that knowledge of the world’s language and culture is increasingly important. In order to use the language effectively, language learners need to have mastery of not only the language itself but also the culture in which the language is used. Language learners need to be aware, for example, of the culturally appropriate ways to address people, express gratitude, make requests, and agree or disagree with someone. They should know that behaviours and intonation patterns that are appropriate in their own speech community may be perceived different by members of the target language speech community. They have to understand that, in order for communication to be successful, language use must be associated with other culturally appropriate behavior.
In short, culture becomes an indispensable part in any foreign language curriculum. Tourism students at HCC are fully aware of this. When being asked why culture is very important, they believe that understanding culture helps them become more confident and successful in communicating and that cultural information is one kind of their motivation in learning English. On the contrary, many of them do not realize the importance of culture in ELL because they say that learning English is a hard work for them to master it as a language, and English cultural knowledge is one of their problem.
Teaching English culture is considered important by most teachers but it has remained “insubstantial and sporadic in most language classroom” (Omaggio, 1993:357). Omaggio gives several reasons for this including lack of time, uncertainty about which aspects of culture to teach, and lack of practical techniques. Although language teachers realize the importance of teaching English culture in EFL classes and the potential of improving the teaching of English culture is tremendous, the outstanding problems to be solved are still improving. Among many others, I found that the biggest headache for language teachers, especially the teacher of EFL, is how to integrate English culture teaching into our language programs. This is the matter I want to raise in my thesis. It is an attempt to look into the matter of how to incorporate cultural elements into English training at HCC.