The Role of Culture in Foreign Language Acquisition

Abstract

Language is a basic tool for communication. It expresses feelings, emotions, needs, thoughts, etc. Culture is the actual life of a particular group of people. This research aims at defining language and culture, and it examines the relationship between them as well as the important role that culture plays in teaching and learning English as a foreign language in Libya. This study is made up of two parts; theoretical and practical. The theoretical part sheds light on the relation between language and culture and on how to incorporate culture in English language course-books. The practical part includes two sections; the first is an analysis of the cultural content of the course-books used in the secondary level in Libya while the second takes care of collecting data from the target population; i.e. the students who have already finished the secondary school and are currently in the first semester at Al-Asmariya Islamic University, Libya. The targeted students belong to six faculties. Questionnaire was the tool used for collecting data for this study. The data collected was analysed statistically. The results showed that culture plays a significant role in acquiring language. Generally, there were negligible effects of both gender and school on language acquisition. Briefly, the students in the faculties of Medicine, Dentistry, and Arts hade higher scores than those of their colleagues in other faculties.Furthermore, the results indicated that the highest score was 89% while the lowest was 23%. Whereas 94% of respondents had scores greater than 40%. Anyhow, the researchers argue for the necessity of organising training courses for the teachers of English in the secondary level as well as supplying the necessary teaching aids for language classes, so that the cultural content can be taught more effectively.