《culture_in_teaching_and_learning》.pdf

73 The Reading Matrix Vol. 5, No. 1, April 2005 CULTURE IN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING Bilal Genc and Erdogan Bada Email: bgenc@.tr badae@.tr Abstract This study was conducted with the participation of the students of the ELT department of Çukurova University in Turkey. We have tried to find out what students think about the effects of the culture class they attended in the fall semester of 2003-2004 academic year. As a result of the study, a significant similarity between the students’ views and the theoretical benefits of a culture class as argued by some experts in the field was observed. Regarding the benefits of learning about culture, attending the culture class has raised cultural awareness in ELT students concerning both native and target societies. This study illustrates how arguments of language teaching experts in favour of a culture class in language learning and teaching are justified by some sound evidence provided by the participants of this study. Introduction The dialectical connection between language and culture has always been a concern of L2 teachers and educators. Whether culture of the target language is to be incorporated into L2 teaching has been a subject of rapid change throughout language teaching history. In the course of time, the pendulum of ELT practitioners’ opinion has swung against or for teaching culture in context of language teaching. For example, during the first decades of the 20th century researchers discussed the importance and possibilities of including cultural components into L2 curriculum (Sysoyev Donelson, 2002); the advent of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in the late