LANGUAGE AND CULTURE By WILLIAM RIASCOS M.

1.                         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.

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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.

                        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’.