(Cultural Awareness
Most educators would agree that cultural awareness is an important aim in foreign language teaching. There are, however, differing views on what cultural and intercultural awareness is, and how learners can be encouraged and assisted in moving towards this goal.
In considering cultural awareness in relation to textbooks, I would first like to discuss the term in a wider educational and methodological context. In this context I find it useful to look at two different ways of defining education: according to the Oxford Dictionary the term can mean "instruction" or it can mean "development and personal growth". If we, as textbook authors, regard our task solely as providing reading material and exercises in order to transmit a set of skills that might enable the learner to cope in a foreign country,&免费论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.net】nbsp;we are faced with a purely instrumental and utilitarian view of foreign language teaching.
This is the traditional view of teaching culture, which has its roots in teaching methods long before the advent of a communicative approach to language learning with its focus on the learner. Instruction by the teacher or textbook followed by exercises designed to make the learner merely reproduce or copy language rather than produce his or her own, is very difficult to combine with the development of personal awareness on the part of the learner. If we only try to provide a body of knowledge, hoping that it can be transferred to the learner by the teacher or the textbook, we reinforce what Bourdieu (1994) calls" symbolic power"; i.e. we enforce, through our choice of teaching material, our own values upon the&nb
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