This paper focuses on the importance of cultural awareness in foreign language teaching. We the foreign language educators, are required to instill in our students, a keen interest in the Sociolinguistic rules and a strong understanding of the contemporary culture of that foreign society to help them achieve complete and relevant communication through their language. It is never enough to emphasize to our Indian students, who being neither equipped with the Sociolinguistic competence of the target foreign language, nor having exposure to its communicative rules, the extreme importance of imbibing the significance of the culture to shape their learnt language. Their awareness of that culture will eventually give them an innate, if not an almost, spontaneous ability to choose the right words, proverbs and terminologies to express themselves through their language. We cannot disagree with the fact that the proper aim of language teaching is communication. Communicative competence is concerned with the concrete acts of language use and the social rules of language use (Allwright, 1976). It is that competence, which we have to provide to our students, teaching them, ‘when to speak, ‘when not’ and ‘what to talk about with whom, when and where and in what manner’.

Author Name: (Dr.) NeerjaSamajdar

URL: View PDF

Keywords: Cultural awareness, communicative competence, target foreign culture, foreign language educators ,Assistant Professor

ISSN: 2321-7065

EISSN: 2321-7065

EOI/DOI: 3-1-2015

Add Citation Views: 3269

---