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Developing Cultural Awareness in Language Instructional Materials

Abstract

Every language has its cultural norms, some of which can be completely different and conflict with other cultures' norms. Consequently, communication problems may arise among language users who do not know or share the norms of other cultures. Perhaps one solution for such problems is to help language learners to learn the target culture within the syllabus. Raising the learners' cultural awareness in a language course, as Tomlinson and Masuhara (2004) note, can facilitate language acquisition too. This paper aims at presenting a general understanding of cultural awareness and surveying different ways through which it can be developed in language instructional materials.