Study abroad has become a very popular phenomenon in this global world. For the students of the Erasmus programme, study abroad is seen as a key to developing professional skills and knowledge of both foreign languages and cultures. However, studying in a foreign country also means living in a different culture with different lifestyle, language, values and traditions. In this paper, I will analyze the concepts of culture and integration. I will focus on the role of language in integration and emphasize the importance of raising cultural awareness through introduction of cultural elements into the Lithuanian language classroom. In addition, I will suggest some methods how to gain knowledge of both the language and culture and some other ways how to facilitate Erasmus students’ social, academic and practical integration into Lithuanian culture during their studies at Mykolas Romeris University.

The article emphasizes the growing importance of intercultural communication, especially in education. It defines culture and outlines its constituent categories, focusing on differences in linguistic communication—general variations in vocabulary and grammar, prosodic factors, and certain body-language features across cultures. Because human interaction involves more than linguistic dimensions, the discussion also touches on religion, value and attitude disparities. The authors propose initial steps to raise cultural awareness among all participants in intercultural communication and suggest ways to internationalize curricula to succeed as an international institution. Internationalization of education is not merely the exchange of students and teachers; the article highlights common challenges and offers advice on how our university integrates culture into teaching and learning.

In the article we would like to emphasize the importance of teaching culture in a foreign language classroom. In the theoretical part we touch upon the understanding of foreign language learning, name its components making the emphasis on the importance of integrating culture and providing related observations of some prominent scholars. In addition, we try to reveal the essence of culture in relationship with a language and make an effort to prove that a language and culture are inseparable. In retrospect we shortly review the attempts of some linguists of the nineteenth and twentieth centu ries to support the idea of teaching culture through language. We also indicate the most common drawbacks in teaching a foreign language which are typical of many teachers in Lithuania and throughout the world. Thus, we provide the reasons for teaching culture in a foreign language classroom and outline the goals for this. We also give some advice on how to introduce cultural elements into a foreign language classroom, suggest what to start with in order to raise students’ awareness of culture and encourage them to compare their own and target cultures at different levels of studies. Besides we provide examples of how different acts of behaviour would be interpreted in different cultures and suggest incorporating different forms of non- verbal communication. We also give and analyse the data of our research, which only replenish both the theoretical and practical parts of the article.