- LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit,
of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the
distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts.
Cultures are the ideas, customs, the beliefs and social behavior of a
particular people or society, group, place, or time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_dbaugeRh8
On the other hand, language in the context of
communication is the process by which information can be transmitted from one
person to another. It may also be defined as the exchange of feelings, opinion,
ideas; also language is viewed as a code. In this view language is made up of
words and series of rules that connect words together.
Language as sociocultural
resource
A sociocultural perspective on human action locates
the essence of social life in communication. Through our use of linguistic
symbols with others we establish goals, negotiate the means to reach them, and
reconceptualise those we have set. At the same time, we articulate and manage
our individual identities, our interpersonal relationships, and memberships in
our social groups and communities.
Dialogue as the essence of
language use
As the structures of our linguistic resources emerge
from their real-world uses, so do their meanings. The linguistic resources we choose to use at
particular communicative moments come to these moments with their conventionalized
histories of meaning. It is their conventionality that binds us to some degree
to particular ways of realizing our collective history.
Culture
as sociocultural practice
The notion of culture has always been considered an
important concept in applied linguistics.
Sociocultural practices are recurrent ways of doing
certain things; these practices are linked to culture, usually born and raised
within the practices of a community.
THEORIES,
LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE: WHORF WITHOUT WINCING
Language
and Thought
These two words are
fundamental in each process of building personal development and to establish
social relationships, a major Tool to humans is through the language from the
social environment helps the individual to internalize and express your
thoughts.
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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
According to Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, all higher levels
of thinking are dependent on language, language determines thought. This strong
notion is also called linguistic determinism. Linguistic Determinism is a concept taken from
the narrow field of analytic philosophy and postulates that human language
limits and determines human thought patterns and knowledge. This concept makes
an assumption that language both reflects and limits human mentality and its
ability to make cross-cultural connections.
Which referred to approach neo-grammarian?
The Neogrammarians were a German school of
linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century
who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change.
According to this hypothesis, a diachronic sound change affects simultaneously
all words in which its environment is met, without exception. Varner’s Law is a
famous example of the Neogrammarian hypothesis, as it resolved an apparent
exception to Grimm's Law. The Neogrammarian hypothesis was the first hypothesis
of sound change to attempt to follow the principle of falsifiability according
to scientific method. Today this hypothesis is considered more of guiding
principles than an exceptionless fact, as numerous examples of lexical
diffusion (where a sound change affects only a few words at first and then
gradually spreads to other words) have been attested.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHING CULTURE IN THE FOREIGN
LANGUAGE CLASSROOM.
Foreign language learning is comprised of several components, including
grammatical competence, communicative competence, language proficiency, as well
as a change in attitudes towards one’s own or another culture. For scholars and
laymen alike, cultural competence, the knowledge of the conventions, customs,
beliefs, and systems of meaning of another country, is indisputably an integral
part of foreign language learning, and many teachers have seen it as their goal
to incorporate the teaching of culture into the foreign language curriculum. It
could be maintained that the notion of communicative competence, which, in the
past decade or so, has blazed a trail, so to speak, in foreign language
teaching, emphasizing the role of context and the circumstances under which
language can be used accurately and appropriately.
As will become evident, the role of cultural learning in the foreign
language classroom has been the concern of many teachers and scholars and has
sparked considerable controversy, yet its validity as an equal complement to language
learning has often been overlooked or even impugned.
Up to now, two main perspectives have influenced the teaching
of culture. One pertains to the transmission of factual, cultural information, which
consists in statistical information, that is, institutional structures and
other aspects of the target civilization, highbrow information, i.e., immersion
in literature and the arts, and lowbrow information, which may focus on the customs,
habits, and folklore of everyday life (see Kramsch, 1993: 24).
What
is Culture and why should it be
Taught?
Culture might be the human attachment that the member
in a community have in common and that they can be recognized by it. It is
important to be taught because it broadens the students' horizons now that they
can understand the behavior and customs from places they someday might visit.
Cultures are the ideas, customs, the beliefs and
social behavior of a particular people or society, group, place, or time.
We should taught culture in the school and university,
because we cannot let our students lost their beliefs, customs and very
important information about our ancestors. Therefore culture should be taught because it
is a means to know other cultures; also we are member of multiples groups and
communities. So, the teaching of culture should go hand in hand with the
teaching and learning of a foreign language in the classroom. Culture teaching
should allow learner to increase their knowledge of the target culture in terms
of people´s way of life, values, attitudes and beliefs. Also culture must be
taught because through the teaching of culture we can comprehend and respect the
other cultures each other.
LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE
An understanding of language as ‘open, dynamic,
energetic, constantly evolving and personal’ (Shohamy, 2007:5) encompasses the
rich complexities of communication. This expanded view of language also makes
educational experience more engaging for students. Language is not a thing to
be studied but a way of seeing, understanding and communicating about the world
and each language user uses his or her language(s) differently to do this. People
use language for purposeful communication and learning a new language involves
learning how to use words, rules and knowledge about language and its use in
order to communicate with speakers of the language.
SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING
This
understanding of language sees a language not simply as a body of knowledge to
be learnt but as a social practice in which to participate (Kramsch, 1994). Language
is something that people do in their daily lives and something they use to
express, create and interpret meanings and to establish and maintain social and
interpersonal relationships.
Theories that have been
developed to account for second language learning, or acquisition, are closely
related to those discussed above as general learning theories. A behaviorist
approach to second language learning focuses on imitation, practice,
encouragement and habit formation. Learning a second language necessarily
involves comparison with the learner’s first language, but the latter is
generally perceived as causing ‘interference’ in the learning of additional
one(s). This approach is seen now to offer an insufficient explanation of the
complexity of language learning.
The linguist Noam
Chomsky (1957) provided a major critique of behaviorism and its view of second
language learning as imitation and habit formation. He developed a theory of
first language learning that suggests that language learning is an innate
capacity – that children are programmed to acquire language thanks to their
in-built knowledge of a Universal Grammar. He called this knowledge ‘competence’.
