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Recently language educators are interested in teaching culture in their classrooms, which means that there is a general consensus among them about the need for language learners' cultural awareness of the community where the target language is used. However, there does not seem to be an agreed-upon concept of culture. This is largely because of the difficulty to define the concept of culture. In this paper, I propose that the ideational dimension of culture should be taught in language classrooms since it is closely related to the concept of communicative competence.
Another problem is that there are few researches on the culture teaching methods. I propose that language educators should teach the aspects of culture which are closely related to language use. To do so, it is very useful to borrow some methodological devices developed in anthropology, sociology, and/or sociolinguistics. Tentatively, I recommend those methods like ethnoscience, the ethnography of communication, conversation analysis, the analysis of tropes, the analysis of silence, kinesics, proxemics, occulesics, and haptics. (Seoul National University)