Arab Educational Information Network

Teaching English as a foreign language has gone through many theories and approaches through time. Communicative Language Teaching is an approach which is being implemented in teaching English as a foreign language in wide areas of the world nowadays. This paper tries to explore the effect of culture and society in teaching the English language following the communicative language teaching approach. It provides clarifications of the meaning of communicative competence and its components and how it differs from linguistic competence and other types of competence. Also, the intercultural competence has been considered in this paper as it plays an important role in language teaching as well. The appropriate use of a language comes from its use within the society. The society of the target language, which is English, and its culture have significant influence in teaching English as a foreign language. This research paper shows that language and culture are related to each other and using the language appropriately requires the possess of good knowledge and background about the target language's culture and society. (Published abstract)