ABSTRACT
The cultural component in language teaching has often focused on behavioral prescriptions and information about the Other, usually wrapped in a vision of understanding and absence of conflict, refusing to be ideological and minimizing problematizations. Culture, in our view, is a constitutive and dynamic process, built in interaction, which poses for foreign language teaching and learning the need to problematize the notion of one and homogeneous national culture, which usually dominates the pedagogical practices in the area. We believe that it is important not to associate a language to a culture and vice versa, but to cover issues that take into account the subjectivity of the learner and the teacher. In order to contribute to the discussion of the cultural component in language teaching, we begin with the presentation of the historical development of the concept of culture, from etymology, permeating its semantic and conceptual unfoldings in the Human and Social Sciences as well as in the theories of Applied Linguistics to the teaching of foreign languages. In this sense, we discuss approaches to the teaching of culture in language education, pointing that the theoretical advances do not correspond to what is usually brought in textbooks and in classroom practices in relation to culture due to a trend to provide information about the culture of the Other, by means of comparisons related to national and ethnic identities which see cultural difference through an objectivist perspective. By questioning the thought which has influenced and continues to influence the role of the cultural component in foreign language teaching, we also seek for ways of inserting it in language education nowadays so as to focus on the learners' (inter)subjectivity as participants in diversity and in the emergence of culture, viewed as dynamic, in the interaction with the Other.
culture; intercultural communication; language teaching