Since I'm not a native speaker of my second lanuage, I would try to bring in
native speakers and expose the students to the language as spoken by natives. I
agree with Kramsh that culture cannot be separated from anything, and that context
and culture must be considered by the teacher and learned from the very beginning.
And I would teach students that second language learning is important even if you
won't use it to get a job, that it will expand your understanding of other cultures
and give you more insight into the rest of the world and can help you understand
English because so many of our words come from other languages. I would try to
incorparate many of the methods described by Omaggio-Hadley (except perhaps the
Silent Method, which seems like it would work but only if you had forever to
learn the language and didn't have a strict curriculum to follow); my professors
and teachers in high school and college have used a mix of reading comprehension,
listening, visual, and writing excercises to promote proficiency. I would give
students opportunities to explore a topic about the L2 culture that he/she is
interested in, and have the student share the information with the class. I wouldn't
force them to speak in class but have informal conversations in class, maybe
comparing and contrasting aspects of the two cultures.
And as always I would emphasize the benefits of study abroad for understanding of
culture and exposure to native speakers (certainly when your French mother tells
you that she is serving noodles with no sauce for dinner but offers you ketchup
to pour on them because she thinks that Americans must eat ketchup with everything,
you learn something about the culture). I couldn't stress this enough to my students.