Abstract:

Cultural competence is a constituent part of communicative competence. Culture teaching is an important aspect of foreign language teaching. This study attempts to gain an insight into pre-service teacher practices in teaching foreign language culture. The study investigates the use of culture teaching strategies in pre-service EFL (English as a foreign language) student teachers' school-based teaching. The author analyses 75 lesson plans made by Croatian EFL student teachers' during their teaching practice. The aim of the study is to investigate the presence of cultural goals in student teachers' lesson plans and to provide an account for the strategies for teaching culture as they were used in the lesson plans.

The analyses address the following questions:
1) What is the presence of cultural goals in student teachers' lesson plans?;
2) What is the occurrence and frequency of the techniques for culture teaching?;
3) What is the distribution of the types of activities for culture teaching?.

The findings show that cultural goals are frequent in pre-service teachers' lesson planning. A great variability may be noticed in the frequency of different techniques and activities used to achieve the cultural aims of the lesson. A complex of reasons for differences in the frequency distribution of the various techniques and activities might be looked for in the cultural goals of the lesson, learners' expected knowledge and experiences, learners' age, student teachers' cultural competence, teaching materials etc. Based on the obtained results the implications of this study for the school-based teaching practice and teacher education are considered in the conclusive part of the paper.

Keywords:

Foreign language teaching, culture teaching, student teachers, lesson planning, cultural goals, techniques, activities.