Culture and Language Learning

Culture and Language Learning

1. Culture: Markus and Hamedani (2007) define culture “as patterns of representations, actions, and artifacts that are distributed or spread by social interaction”

2. Cultural Psychology1 People and their social worlds are indivisible; they need each other. This challenging notion is a core element of cultural psychology.

3. Self-Construal Self-construal across cultures can vary significantly. However, people Within a culture may use one or the other form of self-construal to varying degrees in different circumstances within that culture.

4. The Theory of Mind (ToM) When people learn the culture of their cultural group, they must be equipped with mental machinery that can extract the beliefs and values of the underlying behavior of this culture, in order to become competent members of it.

5. Theory of Mind and Culture The universal ToM hypothesis seems to have some limitations. Research is indicating that ToM performance may be dependent on culture. Wu and Keysar (2007) point out that perspective-taking ability (Theory of Mind) seems to be universal; however, one’s use of this ability to interpret another’s actions might not be. As we have already discussed in this chapter, Westerners have a more prominent representation of self than of others, and Easterners have a more prominent representation of others than of the self.

6. Theory of Mind and Second Language Acquisition Bilingualism may influence a person’s use of Theory of Mind. Berguno and Bowler (2004) investigated children’s understanding of mind in relation to the quality of their social interaction.

7. Theory of Mind and Conversation This mental model is what aninterlocutor knows and is interested in, in terms of what her counterpart is like. We adjust our speech according to our partner in order to not be too complex or too simplistic, so that we are not conversing about something of no interest to the listener.

8. Language Only humans possess language, which permits them to express communicative intentions through a system of signs and symbols in unlimited ways. Children can acquire any language, even though languages differ extremely in their structures.

9. Language and Culture Intertwined Language and culture are profoundly interconnected. Throughout this chapter, I would like to provide examples of how. Perhaps the best place to start is by looking at gendered language

10. Language, Gender, and Self-Construal In much of Western culture, a person is viewed as “an independent, selfcontained autonomous entity, who (a) comprises a unique configuration of internal attributes (e.g. traits, abilities, morals, and values), and (b) behaves primarily as a consequence of these internal attributes” (Markus and Kitayama, 1991, p. 224). This results in the development of an independent self-construal. Central to this type of self-construal is the self as“ separate from others.”

11. Other Aspects of Culture and Language Logan (1986) purports that language allows for cultural variations in reasoning styles. Learning to read and write with an alphabet supplies Westerners with more than a classification model and literacy. It provides them with a system of a conceptual organization for analysis and a system for restructuring of their perceptions of reality (p. 18).

12. Object Categorization Another area that shows a very close link between culture and language is how individuals categorize objects. Nisbett (2003) refers to a study he conducted with American and Chinese students in which they had to indicate what two words out of a group of three (e.g. panda, monkey, banana) were more closely related.

13. Ethnosyntax Another aspect demonstrating the connection between language and culture is grammar. Enfield (2002) states that types of culturally inf luenced grammar are called ethnosyntax, which he defines as a broad study of the connections between cultural knowledge, attitudes, and practices of speakers, and the morphosyntactic resources they use in speech. Wierzbicka (1979) coined the expression ethnosyntax and claims that “every language embodies in its very structure a certain world view, a certain philosophy”

14. Interlanguage There are, however, other dimensions necessary for the learner to become competent such as vocabulary, phonology, pragmatics, and discourse. SLA research has been the most fruitful and most persistent in the realms of L2 morphology and syntax (p. 110). Nowhere in Ortega’s descriptions or definitions does she include culture, the native culture or the target culture.

15. Culture within SLA Second language learning has been primarily concerned with language instruction since its inception as an academic field. Linguistics has traditionally been interested in the universal principles, grammatical structures and modeling at the surface level of a single sentence.

16. Culture and second language acquisition Language is critical tool and component of culture language is a cultural activity and simultaneously a tool for organizing other aspects of culture. Cultural linguists can be applied to second language learning by clarifying cultural conceptualizations that are traditionally connected to diverse features of the L2

17. Language and culture are intimated related We consider language to be a communication process by which individuals use linguistic conventions to attain communicative goals. Those conventions are learnt and validated in the culture where the children grow