【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 ning were cast in a “behavior mould,” being the products of imitation and language “drills,” and language was thought of as a pendium of rules and strings of words and sentences used to form propositions about a state of affairs. In the last two decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of language in relation to society, which has led to a shift of focus from behaviorism and positivism to constructivism to critical theory (see Benson amp。 Voller, 1997: 1925). Yet, there are still some deeply ingrained beliefs as to the nature of language learning and teaching—beliefs that determine methodology as well as the content of the foreign language curriculum—which have, gradually and insidiously, contrived to undermine the teaching of culture.One of the misconceptions that have permeated foreign language teaching is the conviction that language is merely a code and, once mastered—mainly by dint of steeping oneself into grammatical rules and some aspects of the social context in which it is embedded—‘one language is essentially (albeit not easily) translatable into another’ (Kramsch, 1993: 1). To a certain extent, this belief has been instrumental in promoting various approaches to foreign language teaching—pragmatic, sociallinguistic, and municative—which have certainly endowed the study of language with a social “hue”。 nevertheless, paying lip service to the social dynamics that underline language without trying to identify and gain insights into the very fabric of society and culture that have e to charge language in many and varied ways can only cause misunderstanding and lead to crosscultural mismunication.At any rate, foreign language learning is foreign culture learning, and, in one form or another, culture has, even implicitly, been taught in the foreign language classroom—if for different reasons. What is debatable, though, is what is meant by the term “culture” and how the latter is integrated into language learning and teaching. Kramsch’s keen observation should not go unnoticed:Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hardwon municative petence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them. (Kramsch, 1993: 1)The teaching of culture is not akin to the transmission of information regarding the people of the target munity or country—even though knowledge about (let alone experience of) the “target group” is an important ingredient (see Nostrand, 1967: 118). It would be nothing short of ludicrous to assert that culture is merely a repository of facts and experiences to which one can have recourse, if need be. Furthermore, what Kramsch herself seems to insinuate is that to learn a foreign language is not merely to learn how to municate but also to discover how much leeway the target language allows learners to manipulate grammatical forms, sounds, and meanings, and to reflect upon, or even flout, socially accepted norms at work both in their own or the target culture.There is definitely more than meets the eye, and the present paper has the aim of unraveling the “mystery,” shedding some light on the role of teaching culture in fostering crosscultural understanding which transcends the boundaries of linguistic forms—while enriching and giving far deeper meaning to what is dubbed “municative petence”—and runs counter to a solipsistic world view. I would like to show that the teaching of culture has enjoyed far less “adulation” than it merits, and consider ways of incorporating it not only into the foreign language curriculum but also into learners’ repertoire and outlook on life. The main premise of this paper is that we cannot go about teaching a foreign language without at least offering some insights into its speakers’ culture. By the same token, we cannot go about fostering “municative petence” without taking into account the different views and perspectives of people in different cultures which may enhance or even inhibit munication. After all, munication requires understanding, and understanding requires stepping into the shoes of the foreigner and sifting her cultural baggage, while always ‘putting [the target] culture in relation with one’s own’ (Kramsch, 1993: 205). Moreover, we should be cognizant of the fact that if we teach language without teaching at the same time the culture in which it operates, we are teaching meaningless symbols or symbols to which the student attaches the wrong meaning…’ (Politzer, 1959: 100101).Chapter IIOverall Study: Culture amp。 Culture Teaching. Definition amp。 Variation of CultureDefinitionWhat exactly is culture? As Nemni (1992) and Street (1993) suggest, this is not an easy question to answer, particularly in an increasingly international world. On a general level, culture has been referred to as ‘the ways of a people’ (Lado, 1957). This view incorporates both ‘material’ manifestations of culture that are easily seen and ‘nonmaterial’ ones that are more difficult to observe, as SavilleTroike (1975: 83) notes. Anthropologists define culture as ‘the whole way of life of a people or group. In this context, culture (sic) includes all the social practices that bond a group of people together and distinguish them from others’ (Montgomery and ReidThomas, 1994: 5). According to Peck (1998), Culture is all the accepted and patterned ways of behavior of a given people. It is that facet of human life learned by people as a result of belonging to some particular group。 it is that part of learned behavior shared with others. Not only does this concept include a group’s way of thinking, feeling, and acting, but also the internalized patterns for doing certain things in certain ways, not just the doing of them. This concept of cul