RANIAN EFL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS ON TEACHING CULTURE IN FL CLASSROOM

Intercultural competence in the paradigm of intercultural communicative competence plays an important role in the present time of the Foreign Language Teaching profession. Intercultural skills (Sercu, L.2004) of the intercultural speakers (Byram, M.2000), rather than the language skills of the language speakers is more prominent nowadays. This slight shift in the view of the language researchers and experts certainly affects the role that teachers are going to play. Language teachers are supposed to promote the acquisition of intercultural skills and consequently, culture dimension in their learners. The present study concentrates its focus on the role of teachers as mediators of foreign language and culture in the foreign language class. Iranian foreign language teachers are the participants of the study. They are supposed to express their opinion regarding several aspects of including the culture element in foreign language teaching. These teachers are from different parts of Iran. A questionnaire is distributed among the teachers. To analyze the questionnaire frequencies are computed, chi square is obtained and finally the r formula for some of the answers is used. Completing the questionnaire, teachers explain how they perceive of culture and language teaching. The participants also explain the extent to which they are interested in interculturalizing the foreign language teaching and the conditions and circumstances they think to be important doing that. It is supposed that teacher training programs pay a little more attention to training the language teachers regarding the culture element and intercultural skills as well as intercultural competence. The curriculum developers also are supposed to include more cultural points and information in the material the teachers are using. The teachers who believe that interculturalizing the foreign language teaching is important should be aware that they are more linguistic-oriented and pay less attention to the intercultural skills and knowledge and it will hinder them from integrating language and culture.