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Culture teaching generally focuses on helping foreign language learners develop an understanding of the culture of the target language and, ideally, positive attitudes towards it. In today’s world, the domination of English in entertainment, mass media and new media may sometimes be accompanied by unbalanced views: some EFL learners view English-speaking cultures as superior, while others feel that their own culture is inherently superior to them. This paper argues that in a world where non-native speakers of English outnumber native speakers, culture teaching should widen its aims: in addition to helping learners develop positive attitudes towards and knowledge of the culture of the target language, it should also aim to develop a more explicit understanding of the rules of the learners’ own culture. It looks at the concepts of communicative competence and pragmatic failure, and then presents a model of analysis of Persian culture, looking at the concept and components of ‘face’ and the principles of politeness in Persian (deference, humility and cordiality). It then demonstrates how this analysis can be used to develop classroom strategies. The writer concludes that explicit understanding of both target and learners’ own culture can equip learners with the ability to analyse and understand other cultures, and have positive effective cognitive, behavioural and affective outcomes. KEYWORDS: culture teaching; EFL teaching; pragmatic failure; Persian politeness; face in Persian; politeness theory
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