Teaching Culture in the Classroom to Arabic Language Students

Arabic language learning comprises of certain elements, including syntactic ability, oral capability, dialect proficiency, and a change in state of mind towards different culture or society. For teachers and laymen alike, cultural competence, i.e., the knowledge of the customs, beliefs, and systems of another country, is indisputably an integral part of Arabic language learning, and many teachers have seen it as their goal to merge the teaching of culture into the Arabic language teaching classes. It could be argued that the notion of communicative competence asserts the role of context and the circumstances under which language can be employed properly and appropriately. In other words, since the wider context of language, that is, society and culture, has been expanded, many teachers and students incessantly talk about it without knowing what its exact meaning is. In fact, what most teachers and students seem to lose is the fact that knowledge of the grammatical system of Arabic language grammatical competence has to be complemented by understanding of culture-specific meanings.