Language learning is a form of cultural learning, and cultural learning embraces language learning. The goal of cultural learning is a continuing search for understanding that bridges cultures. Language can be a bridge, a system that constructs reality as it communicates about reality. Education in the U.S. has tended to define culture as American culture, and so has institutionalized ethnocentrism. To change this approach, significant reforms in teaching are needed: (1) language teachers should no longer call their subject foreign, because this practice engenders prejudice; (2) teachers need more substantial training in semantics, kinesics, proxemics, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and communications theory; (3) literature should be learned as culture rather than as criticism; (4) meaning must be combined with grammar, and function with form; (5) language teaching must take into account that the American university model of knowledge and authority may not correspond to that of other countries; and (6) methods and materials should be more geared to what is current and real in other countries. (MSE)