THE IMPORTANT ROLE OF CULTURE IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

We cannot separate language and culture; learning a language without culture means failure in its
use (Mobasser and Saaedi Tavakoli, 2011).

A. Introduction
The reason why I choose this issue because is it important to us to know that
language learning and culture has a strong relation. Nowadays, English is become the
International language, so that in teaching English, teachers are not only teaching about
grammar, vocabulary, and etc. But they are also need to teaching about culture to make
learners can communicate well. In this case each country has different culture and it’s
affected to their language use and language learning.
Therefore in this paper I would like to give argue that I am agree with statement “We
cannot separate language and culture; learning a language without culture means failure in
its use” (Mobasser and Saaedi Tavakoli). Then, I would discuss that culture has strong
relation and important role in language learning.

B. Discussion
Culture which has been defined as “the behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions,
and all other products of human work and thought, esp. as expressed in a particular
community or period” in The American Heritage Dictionary has been defined and
considered by many scholars. It means language is a kind of culture. In this case language is a
product from a human work. Moreover, Rashidi and Najafi (2010) stated that culture and
language are related. They believed “relationship between language and culture is so great
that they are referred to as the sides of the same coin”.
According to Clouet (2006) in the last three decades culture has been becoming a
significant part of language teaching. In his view, every particular language is composed of a
particular system of values which manifests the culture. Therefore, learning a language
necessarily involves learning the culture in order to be able to communicate successfully, but
this learning should be comparative and contrastive. Students learn a new system of values by
learning the target culture which can be understood in the light of learners’ existing cultural
knowledge to be meaningful for them. This will lead to their appraisal of the target culture
and better understanding of their native culture.
Based on my experience, if I watching western movie sometimes I find people using
uncommon words in English that I am not study at school and university, in this case is using
"black English words" that sounds harsh to the Indonesian but it turns out the meaning is
different from the understanding of Indonesian, because we do not know about Black English
native culture. For example, sentence “you are my fucking friend” for Indonesian it sounds
rude but for western people it means that you are my best friend. So that is why it's so
important to learn culture, so it does not cause misinterpretation that can lead to contention.
And also for several words it has more than one meaning, like words “diving” in
general we know that diving is dive in the sea, but it has different meaning when we hear it in
sports especially in soccer, diving means an act of a football player who deliberately pretends
to be fallen, violated or in pain by another player despite no physical contact, to deceive the
referee and provoke another player. That is what we call context, in learning English we need
to know the context. Context has fundamental role in the use of language to make someone or
somebody knows what they are purposes/talking about and make communication each other
become going well.
 Furthermore, Hayati (2009) stated language is a means to convey cultural information
and it reflects ways of thinking and emphasized the impossibility of teaching English without
culture. I agree with this notion because as we can see from my example above in learning
English we need to know about context and this context is a product of human work. In other
hand we can say that context is including in culture. Therefore, it is impossible to teach
English without culture.
From several notions above, we know that to learn English its need to learn culture
too. Without culture it is impossible to learn English and communicate well because culture
have important role in learning a language. It support Mobasser and Saaedi Tavakoli notion
that “we cannot separate language and culture; learning a language without culture means
failure in its use”.

C. Conclusion
In conclusion, culture has strong relation and important role in learning a language.
Language is one of the cultures so that in learning a language is not only learning about a
language parts, but also the culture from the language. Learning a language necessarily
involves learning the culture in order to be able to communicate successfully. Learning a
language without culture can cause misinterpretation. In learning language culture can help
learners to deep comprehension about the language. Therefore, in learning language we
cannot separated language and culture.