Cultural competence in language teaching: The importance of knowing the target culture

This thesis examines the importance of knowing the target culture for a language teacher. The key issue of this work is to show, that developing intercultural competence is stíli not the part of the language teachers' education. Only a small number of the English teacher have been to the target language culture; moreover, most of them stayed only for a few weeks. First of all, intend to prove that language and culture are connected closely and that successful language teaching cannot be achieved without integrating culture. Definitions of culture will be revealed then the relation of language and culture and language and thought. This thesis is mainly built on the results of a questionnaire I assembled to highlight that only half of the English teachers have ever been to the target language culture The last opinion is that since most of us have not been to the USA or Britain, we have to be the cultural informants of our students. I tried to show there are many ways to build our cultural competence and it is our responsibility to provide genuine information for our students.