Darwin Valderrama

Advantages and disadvantages of learning English as it is taught nowadays. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops. -Henry Brooks Adams-

Teachers always have been supposed to be a guide for learners who need their help. In fact, they have the responsibility to provide lots of knowledge for their students to be better persons. Because of that responsibility, teachers -especially language ones- have to give students all the tools they will require to enter a new culture in order to fulfill the purpose above said; that is, teachers have to show learners the social conventions, ideologies, cultural expectations, among other aspects of the English-speaking community (Llurda 2004). These things have to be accompanied and complemented by accurate linguistic skills. Nevertheless, what may occur if one of those themes is missing?

On one hand, the excessive teaching of a culture, either American or British, is not good at all. Learning a language from the customs of any country makes the student acquire a second language but not learn it, inasmuch as the lack of grammar issues does not let him know the syntactic structures of what he is communicating. It is important to make sense about this problem in some cases when a person thinks that travelling to an Englishspeaking country is the best system to speak that language fast.

On the other hand, what happens if teachers are not qualified to inculcate culture properly? These kinds of teachers are just able to explain different, but not less important, pieces of language such as linguistics or grammar. Up to this point, a student will enhance and strengthen his abilities to create a sentence in a correct way or will be able to identify and use as it should be the phonemes of the language he is learning. The only single difficulty is the ignorance of pragmatic differences among foreign cultures. To avoid this disregard, it is necessary to teach some of culture but, unfortunately, it is not possible for these teachers.

In spite of this, it is possible to make a mixture between culture and linguistics in the process of teaching a different language. It is when they both are taught hand by hand by using many strategies such as explaining verb tenses through historical events concerning a culture. Even though such a good idea, for a teacher it is important not to forget the fact that there could be some elements not to be clarified to learners. Teachers have to consider which features are going to be showed and which are not.

Finally, although it is not so pleasant for teachers neither students the leaving some important topics behind, there are many other subjects to be studied in class which surely will induce a further research in order to complete, if it can be said, the education a learner should receive. That latter goal is only possible to achieve if the student wants to.