Abstract:

The basic premise underlying the social psychological perspective of second language acquisition is that language is a major defining attribute of a group of people, and, thus, to learn a language involves some degree of identification with the group that speaks it .That is, the language is more than a symbolic system that facilitates communication.(C.Gardener).Some factors exist that can be as inhibiter in low proficiency level and facilitator at high proficiency level L2 learning such factors relate to social, culture, psychology and so on. Language is a defining behavioral feature of a cultural group, and thus acquiring the language involves taking on patterns of behavior of that group. As a consequence, an individual's attitudes toward that group and toward other cultural groups in general will influence his or her motivation to learn the language, and thus the degree of proficiency attained. For this study one of the cultural factors is chosen, the factor plays as an inhibiter when the learner is in the low proficiency level and becomes facilitator in high proficiency level. For this aim, two classes were selected all of them were beginner and female (each class had 30 learner). For both The New Interchange Series (Third edition by Jack Richards) were taught. At the end of the first term's final exam the teacher analyzed students' final paper then noted that nearly all the student had difficulty in using" He" pronoun when it was used with the opposite sex as a friend and they used appropriately when they use "He" pronoun in the same sex interaction because in their culture (Iranian culture) having friend in opposite sex is excluded. This happened not due to the lack of linguistic knowledge or to detail, not because of the grammatical knowledge shortage, but because the insufficiency of cultural/social competence existed. Students may know the rules of linguistics usage, but be unable to use the language (Widdowson1987).In short being able to communicate required more than linguistic competence; it required communicative competence (Hymes1971).For Chomsky, the focus of linguistic theory was to characterize the abstract ability speakers possess that enable them to produce grammatically correct sentences. Hymes held that such a view of linguistic theory was sterile, that linguistic theory needed to be seen as part of a more general theory incorporating communication and culture. Another influential analysis of communicative competence is found in Canale and Swain (1980), in which four dimensions of communicative competence are identified:
1) Grammatical competence: Knowledge of lexical items and rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics and phonology. Chomsky called this "linguistic competence" and Hymes referred to this as "formally possible".
2) Sociolinguistic competence: Understanding of the social context in which communication takes place, including, role relationship, the shared information of the participant, and the communicative purpose of their interaction.
3) Discourse competence: the interpretation of individual message elements in terms of their interconnectedness and of how meaning is represented in relationship to the entire discourse or text.
4) Strategic competence: coping strategic that communicators employ to initiate, terminate, maintain, repair, and redirect communication.

Keywords:

culture barriers, second language learning, low proficiency.