Why should language teachers teach culture?

There is an implicit and pervasive resistance among many foreign language teachers to going beyond linguistic training and the anecdotal transmission of cultural facts. This paper analyses the deep historical and social reasons for such a resistance in the educational systems of the United States, France and Ireland. It sketches the principles of a discourse‐based pedagogy that views culture as language and language as culture, and that makes the very process of enunciation the locus of cultural difference and personal choice. Such a pedagogy enables teachers to do justice to the diversity they find in the target culture and in the cultures present in their own classrooms, while remaining intrinsically and eminently ‘language’ teachers.