The Cultural Component in the First Language (L1) Teaching: Cultural Heritage, Identity and Motivation in Language Learning

After almost three decades since the insertion of Catalan (Valencian) within the Valencian education system, its use hasn’t spread through all of the geographical domains and social scopes. In a context of language minorisation, an actual usage of a language is not guaranteed by just acquiring a sounder language competence. For a start we take into consideration a hipothesis defending that even though a comprehension of the goal culture in L2 is not just necessary for a significant use of the language within its society, we also have to realise the importance of the cultural import when using L1. We’ve framed our working field within some research projects which focus on the value of cultural imput in L1 and L2 teaching-learning areas (Kramsch, 1996, , Rusell, 1999, Areitzaga, 2005). Another important approach for us is the collective dimension of motivation and attitude as notions traditionally associated with personal factors (Cambra, 2003, ). We aim at researching in a language representation basis in order to be able to understand the lecturer's approach to linguistic representations on the cultural imput when teaching a language (Moore, 2001, , Cambra & Palou, 2007, ). We aply an ethnographic field work based on questionnaires conducted by lecturers from two education centres within Valencian central shires where students show a higher level of learning and usage of Valencian. These centres then propose crucial cross-cutting projects, where the own culture and language have a significant weight, focusing on the relationship between cultural heritage, land and identity. Taking into account cultural and cross-cultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997) we conclude that it is not possible to get to know a different culure whithout realising one's own culture.