A Critical Assessment of Problems in the Teaching of Culture in Iranian Public Schools
Abstract
The following article strives to depict why culture is almost not taught in EFL classes in Iranian schools with the caveat that teaching English devoid of culture shall have dire national and international consequences given that we live in a global village. Based on Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) the article criticizes the Iranian education system because of trying to keep students in ignorance of foreign cultures and Iranian subcultures which leads to illiteracy, itself the main source of prejudice, segregation, hostility, and ethnocentrism. It also accuses the Islamic Republic governments of flip-flopping on this major issue and of condoning Intercultural Communicative Competence’s aims and principles in education. It at first discusses the socio-political context in which English teaching takes place and shows how much anti-foreign culture and anti-foreign language the context is and then it depicts the precarious situation of subcultures and explicates the inevitable negative results that ignoring subcultures may have in a heterogeneous society. The article also accentuates the necessity of the teaching of culture in ELT by giving examples of cultural faux pas. It at last appraises the Iranian English school textbooks clearly showing their shallowness, triviality, incompleteness, and political bias. According to the principles of ICC, the article principally comes to the conclusion that the force of cultural levity at work in the textbooks propagates homogeneity, prejudice, and ignorance all detrimental to Iranian society and its relations with the international community.
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