Culture is a particularly important component of foreign language learning and teaching, which provides the learner with an understanding of the country, people and custom of the language that they are learning; thence, their love and motivation for the language learning can be improved and promoted. However, due to a number of reasons, teaching culture cannot be directly taught for non-majors of English at Thai Nguyen University of Education (TUE). | Nguyễn Thị Hồng Minh Tạp chí KHOA HỌC & CÔNG NGHỆ 87(11): 119 - 124 SUPPLEMENTAL CULTURE-BASED ACTIVITIES IN ENGLISH CLASSES AT THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION Nguyen Thi Hong Minh* College of Education - TNU ABSTRACT Culture is a particularly important component of foreign language learning and teaching, which provides the learner with an understanding of the country, people and custom of the language that they are learning; thence, their love and motivation for the language learning can be improved and promoted. However, due to a number of reasons, teaching culture cannot be directly taught for non-majors of English at Thai Nguyen University of Education (TUE). Wishing to bring the culture of English-speaking countries to the learner, the author has been applied supplemental culture-based activities in her English class as a way of building a bridge between the student and the English culture. Key words: culture, foreign language learning and teaching, supplemental culture-based activities, non-majors of English. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, researchers declare that foreign language learning involves not only grammatical competence, communicative competence and language proficiency but also a certain features and characteristics of the culture. There has been a shared belief in the society of EFL teaching that cultural competence, ., the knowledge of the conventions, customs, beliefs, and systems of meaning of another society, is indisputably an integral part of foreign language learning [10]. This assumption seems to fit well with Bachman‟s [1] model of language competence – that language competence comprises not only language knowledge but also pragmatic competence, of which cultural knowledge is a vital component. A question arises for Vietnamese teachers who are in charge of non-English majors that how culture can be taught to these learners who usually do not have close contact with native speakers of English and have little opportunity to discover .
