Foreign culture may sound strange and unfamiliar to students.

The first step in the teaching of culture is increasing the students’ awareness of the breadth and the nature of that culture. Slowly this initial awareness will translate itself into a feeling of familiarity, with the result that the culture will no longer appear “strange “and “foreign”. The development of cultural awareness consists primarily in the introduction and continued reintroduction of cultural facts of all kinds: geographical information, sociological data, historical personalities and events, contributions in the arts and sciences, and so forth. This cultural material is not simply presented in list form for memorization. Nor is its use limited to a few cultural slides presentations the day before vacation. It must be continually entered and reentered so that it becomes part of the students’ general fun of knowledge. Much of the presentation of culture is teacher-initiated. The teacher plans classroom audiovisual material. Students-oriented activities, however, should not be forgotten: frequently students learn more from projects that they themselves have developed. For instance, in an intermediate Spanish class one of the African students prepared a report, with recorded excerpts, on the African influence in Latin American music and presented it with such enthusiasm and authority that the entire class benefited greatly.