Repositioning Culture in Teaching Target Language: Local Culture or Target Culture?

Abstract

The role of culture in teaching target language is undeniable. This article belongs to a literature review. As such, it deals with the reviews of culture integration in English Language Teaching. The article provides the conflicting findings of teaching target language with local culture or target culture along with the reasonable reasons for each. The writers adopt the systematic way of doing literature review consisting of four steps namely designing the review, conducting the review, analyzing, and writing the review. Drawing from the review of the progress reports in the field, the writer recommends an intermediary for prospective English Language Teaching accommodating both local and target culture in question. Recommendations for future research studies are highlighted at the end.

Teaching Deep Culture to Develop Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) for EFL Pre-service Teachers

“…Instead of focusing cultural content on sole target-language culture, pre-service teachers will gain solid knowledge of vast cultural perspectives if they are exposed to their own culture, target-language culture and international English cultural varieties. Darong and Menggo (2021) affirms that providing learners with a broad look of subjective culture can afford learners the opportunity to broaden their perspectives of English culture in a wider range and reflect on their own culture. This spurs the openness of TEFL paradigm to explore intercultural view of international English uses which is frequently addressed by the paradigm of Teaching English as a Lingua Franca (TELF) (Jenkins, 2004;Ambele & Boonsuk, 2021) or Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL) (McKay, 2002;, Teaching English as Intercultural Communication (Corbett, 2022) and Multicultural Awareness through English (Fay et al, 2010;Gashi, 2021).…”

“…Instead of focusing cultural content on target-language culture only, pre-service teachers will gain a solid knowledge of vast cultural perspectives if they are exposed to their own culture, target-language culture, and other English cultural varieties. Darong and Menggo (2021) affirm that providing learners with a broad look of subjective culture regardless native-speakers culture can afford learners the opportunity to widen their perspectives of English culture in a wider ranger and reflect on their own culture.…”

“…It is because English has been widely spoken by people over the world as a means of intercultural communication (McKay, 2018), so it is not necessary to refer language culture merely to native cultures. Furthermore, teaching and presenting language linked to sole target-language culture may cause several problems which emanate learners experience strange paradoxes and create a new identity or even otherness (Darong & Menggo, 2021). It is, therefore, apparent that it is not necessary to be concerned with cultural aspects of the target language only in inducing invisible culture to pre-service teachers.…”