Barriers to Teaching Culture in Foreign Language Classrooms of Myanmar

Abstract

The teaching of culture has been listed as one of the goals in foreign
language teaching and learning in the new century. However, the beliefs of
foreign language instructors towards the teaching of culture at the university
level remain unclear. Forty language teachers (33 females and 7 males
ranging between 38-54 years of age) from English departments at selected
universities participated in this research. This study was conducted through
interview survey to study the teaching of culture and cultural perspectives
in the language classrooms. In this study we found two profound barriers to
the teaching of cultural perspectives: (i) many language instructors did not
recognize that culture is an important objective for teaching foreign
language in the 21st century, such as lack of knowledge by instructors, lack
of enough time for preparing classes with cultural elements embedded in
them, and (ii) the knowledge of how to teach a language is undervalued such
as lack of appropriate materials, the absence of technological support, and
the real barrier to the teaching of culture and cultural perspectives. Unless
these instructors realized that culture is an important objective for foreign
language teaching in the 21st century, they would not consider the teaching
of culture as a significant part of their teaching. The second major barrier to
the teaching of culture is that the knowledge of the target language is
sufficient and the knowledge of how to teach a language is optional.