2_Language and Culture

2_Language and Culture

1. CULTURE

   • Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of peopl, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. In the same sense, culture is the sum of total of the learned behaviour of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.
   • Hofstede (1980, pp. 21-23) defines culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another”, which is passed from generation to generation, it is changing all the time because each generation adds something of its own before passing it on.

2. LANGUAGE

   • Language, as a social action, is considered to be the first and foremost sociocultural resource constituted by a range of possibilities, an open-ended sets of options in behaviour that are available to the individual in his existence as social man.
   • Language is foremost a means of communication, and communication almost always takes place within some sort of social context. This is why effective communication requires an understanding and recognition of the connections between a language and the people who use it.

3. LANGUAGE AS A SOCIOCULTURAL RESOURSE

   • it has a social function and must be understood as an instrument of interpersonal communication that helps the individual to represent, interpret and understand the world.
   • we use language to communicate those needs and feeling we want to share and express with other individuals
   • the language considered as a sociocultural resource is conceptualized mainly as a dynamic, living collections of tools for the accomplishment of our social lives more than a linguistic structural system. we use it not only to represent the world in our communicative activities, but it is also a form of action by which we bring our cultural environments into existence, maintain them and shape them.

4. LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

   • Language and culture have a clear correlation and evidence of this is the social identity that represents each person.
     • Social identity is a “label” that represents the collective of groups a persona has and currently belongs to.
       • Different social groups we make part of, each bring it’s own linguistic history that all adds to our social identity
         • The perception that each interlocutor has of its counterpart is a reflection of that individual’s use of language, which carries historical significance, which is also transformed based on that individual’s experiences.

5. WHY LANGUAGE SHOULD BE TAUGHT

   • As English teachers then it starts to become evident that need to include culture in the curriculum as a fundamental part of acquiring a new language. It becomes highly improbable that a person could learn a new language without having a comprehension of cultural aspects that would in turn explain and make comprehensible the use of certain expressions,
     • Teaching culture in a language class will help student to understand that culture will be always linked with language and this will create a better understanding of the target language. Let’s remember that learning a language is also learning its culture.