The Assimilation of Literature and Culture in Second Language Acquisition and Learning

Literature is a representation of culture. It is associated with a group of people an embodiment of habits, customs, social behaviour, knowledge and assumptions. In the contemporary world we use Literature in the language classroom to teach culture in the language classroom. Hall focuses on the development of “literature studies based on classics tradition to its present day shift into cultural studies†(Hall 34). So, Literature representation means cultural representation. According to Kramsch, “culture is a membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and a common system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating and action. The term culture will be used in the sense of whatever a person must have in order to function and live in a society†(Kramsch 127).Thus, literature / culture provides a framework for second language acquisition and its relevance with language skills. Thus, socio-cultural factors include in the language teaching / learning materials.