Although the ground of discussion on language and culture has been cleared for ages,
it is not until the 80s that the need of teaching culture in language classes is indicated,
reaching its climax in the 90s thanks to the efforts of Byram and Kramsch as mentioned
previously. For instance in the case of ELT, Pulverness (2003) asserts that due to the
undeniable growth of English as an international language cultural content as anything other
than contextual background was began to be included in language teaching programs.
Although by mid 80s, various advantages of teaching culture in L2 classes were
virtually universally accepted, and culture was widely taught in language classes, there were
still problems about what should be taught and how culture could be taught most beneficially.
These questions were faced more and more 1990s (Kitao, 2000).
If we turn to the relationship between culture and language, we see some remarkable
comments; for example, Sapir (1921) argued that ‘language, race, and culture are not
necessarily correlated’, adding the remark ‘language and our thought-grooves are inextricably
interrelated, are, in a sense, one and the same’. Yet this single remark does not supply a
satisfactory reply to the question of why culture teaching should be involved in language
teaching. Kitao (2000) giving reference to several authors lists some of the benefits of
teaching culture as follows: