Culture Teaching, World Englishes, and the College Scholastic Aptitude Test

This paper aims to measure the extent to which the culture teaching goal announced in the national curriculum for English issued in 2011 by the Ministry of Education has been put into practice. For this purpose, it first points to the fact that the culture teaching goal of the 2011 national curriculum for English is the promotion of intercultural communicative competence and that intercultural communicative competence is a major notion the world Englishes perspective has brought into culture teaching. It then analyzes the English sections in the five versions of the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) administered from 2011 to 2015. The findings include: a) the American variety of English dominates all of the five versions, b) not a single interaction between non-native speakers from the outer and expanding circles takes place, c) statements about cultures of the outer and expanding circle countries are rare, and d) only one test item refers to Korean culture. The study concludes that the current format of the CSAT does not appropriately reflect the key goal of culture teaching presented in the 2011 national curriculum. It suggests a substantial change in the design of the CSAT toward the promotion of intercultural communicative competence.