Culture and Language Go Hand In Hand

And last but not least, the final essay for my Culture and Language Class. I think this essay was really interesting to write, I had to state my opinion about how culture and language cannot be separated, their importance on English Language Teaching (as well as when learning any other language), and how culture complements language and viceversa. :) I don't want to brag, but I think I did a good job on this essay :) It's really long .... I couldn't help it...it was a very interesting subject for me :).

Building Awareness and Practical Skill to Facilitate Cross-Cultural Communication.

By: Paulina Ortega

INTRODUCTION:
Culture and Language go hand in hand and they cannot be separated because they complement each other simultaneously. Culture is influenced by language and at the same time, language is influenced by culture. When the customs in a speech community change, the language will be affected and it happens the other way around as well. When we learn a second or foreign language, we are adopting a new culture to some extent.

The term culture can be defined in many different ways; and we must take into consideration features such as the form, speech acts, rhetorical structure of texts, socio-cultural behaviors, and ways in which knowledge is obtained and transmitted. Culture can be expressed through our body language, gestures, concepts of time, hospitality customs, and even expressions of friendship. All these aspects and factors mentioned reflect the cultural norms established and accepted by a particular society. The tight relationship between Culture and Language use influences how language must be taught and therefore learnt. Everyone is part of a culture, and we are influenced by it and we play our part in our society according to what is expected of us in our culture.

Teaching about the grammar structure, the vocabulary, how to read is not just be given as plain instruction of those structures. We need to teach our students the reasons beyond the forms and the use. We need our students to know how to express themselves in particular situations and how to behave in those situations. Students need to know about the culture of the language that is being learned and of course they get benefits from receiving this kind of cultural instruction besides the regular linguistic instruction on the language they are learning. Some examples of the benefits are that they will be able to communicate efficiently with Native Speakers and also avoid uncomfortable situations due to misunderstandings or ignorance of what shouldn't be done.

Hymes says that learning the culture of the language a person is learning is very important because culture influences the values of the community, everyday interaction, the rules applied to behavior and speech, and the sociocultural expectations of an individual's roles.
"An ability to recognize and employ culturally appropriate ways of communicating in speech or writing allows learners to make choices with regard to linguistic, pragmatic and other behaviors."

For L2 purposes, the term "culture" includes in its definition: the literature, the arts, the architecture, and the history of a particular society; yet we may include as well dress style, cuisine, customs, festivals and other traditions. All these aspects mentioned are part of what we know as the "VISIBLE CULTURE".

But Culture is more than those aspects we can easily perceive. Sociocultural norms, world views (philosophy), beliefs, assumptions, and value systems complete the definition of culture. We can define these aspects as the "Invisible Culture".

Scollon and Scollon say that what is acceptable, appropriate, and expected in one's behavior is acquired during the process of socialization and it becomes an inseparable part of an individual's identity. The roles of the teacher and the students in a classroom are based on the rules and perceptions (of what should be and what shouldn’t be) of a particular society or culture.
It’s not that easy to teach about Culture because it cannot go separate from the L2 instruction. When the learners know about the culture of the L2 or FL, they develop their competence in that language. Therefore, they will be able to communicate with the native speakers of the language.

Teachers must investigate the needs of the learner and establish learning goals in L2/FL. These two steps will help the teacher define what aspects of the culture will be taught in order to satisfy the needs and goals of the learner.

Many important aspects of the culture can be taught within the classroom. Teachers can explain about the culture at the same time they are explaining certain language features. For example they can talk about history using the simple past tense. There are many creative ways to combine the cultural information with the language skills that need to be developed (reading, writing, reading comprehension, vocabulary, speaking). An important benefit of teaching culture is to provide the learners with the knowledge an the tools that will help them interact effectively in the L2/FL environments and social contexts.

Studies have shown that despite they have lived in English-speaking countries for several years, some non-native students, do not always follow the rules of politeness which are expected from their L2 communities. The possible excuses for this are that maybe these learners do not always understand what is expected from them or maybe they don’t have access to the necessary sociocultural concepts that are ubiquitously manifested in the academy. Once clear example is that in English Speaking cultures time is very important and people are expected to arrive in time, but unfortunately in our culture time is not respected and people tend to be late.

The cultural expectations from a particular speech community are acquired through socialization. These expectations and rules are defined as “behavioral prescriptions,” by Stewart. When learners interact with non-native speakers of the L2/FL; they are only exposed to the outcomes of linguistic and other types of behaviors and are restricted from the causes.

The outcomes are the results but the causes are the reasons that explain why one gets certain response from another person when they do something.

It is very important for learners to make observations when they are learning the L2/FL. They must notice the native speakers’ behavior and reactions and that can be achieved through interaction with them.

Through the ability of identification of sociocultural purposes of L2 linguistic behaviors in a community, students are allowed to identify cultural patterns in situations, to understand how they are realized in other situations, and to anticipate their manifestations in the future.

The most important things we should consider when interacting are the gender of the speaker or the hearer, their respective ages, similarities or differences in their social status, their social distance, the purpose of the speech events, the time available for the interaction and its physical setting. The learner must be aware that he won’t address or use the same words he would use when talking to a friend his/her age than he would when talking to a Teacher.

In case the student is not exposed to native speakers’ live interactions, he might observe the interactions presented in T.V. shows or movies. These are very good resources for observation of the use of the L2/FL because the student can learn a lot while having fun.

The teacher should provide activities that are interesting and enjoyable for the learners. An activity suggested in the copies, is one in which students can make “field research” in cafeterias, restaurants, stores and libraries. Students can take notes and observe the behavior of the native speakers. Another thing they can do is to compare the politeness and conversational routines in the learner’s L1 to those found in English-language materials like movie clips, recorded audio and video interviews, taped dialogues that come with a text, or even test material).

If students are in a high-intermediate level, teachers should suggest expanded and more sophisticated activities or interactions. For example for the observation activity they could go to an office, a hallway a street to investigate various speech acts such as making appointments, seeking clarifications, or responding to requests. Students can even participate actively in role plays, skits or mini-plays focusing on the linguistic features they are learning as well as in the context they can be applied to.

When it comes to teaching linguistic and social features of the speech acts, teachers can provide routines using the language emphasizing on the different use depending on the social status of the speaker and the hearer, and other situational factors. Students can also be taught how to use body language and gestures to express themselves.

Thomas says that when there is a failure in the interaction between the native and the non-native speaker it leads to sociopragmatic failure, uncomfortable breakdowns in communication, and stereotyping of the non-native speaker. She points out that non-native speakers do not do these mistakes on purpose and they don’t mean to offend the native speaker.

The pragmatic function (sociocultural purpose) of speech acts such as requests, apologies, compliments, and complaints can be found in practically every curriculum for teaching speaking (no matter the language). The linguistic form of speech acts and conversational routines is one of the most easily accessible and ubiquitous areas of teaching L2 speaking. The pragmatic function of these expressions is the same but the speaker’s choice of form may cause different responses from the hearer. That’s why the learner must learn which the most polite ways to say things are, and in what social context they are best applied.

What is considered more appropriate to say in a certain situation is determined by the sociocultural variables that are usually not addressed in explicit instruction.

“The sociocultural variables that can make a perfectly acceptable expression unacceptable in different interactions or settings reflect the invisible aspects of L1 or L2 culture that do not easily lend themselves to textbook exercises or listings of expressions. Nonetheless, it is the sociocultural features such as gender, age and the sociocultural status of the participants in the interaction that can create a pragmatic failure.”

The students must know the difference when they are going to talk to someone who is older than the way they would address someone their age. They need to know that they can use less formal expressions to interact with their friends and formal expressions when addressing a teacher or when they are facing a business or professional context.

In Conduct field observations and experiments learners are able to acknowledge the different kinds of politeness and the degree of politeness used in determined social contexts. ESL learners can ask their native speaker friends to evaluate their degree of politeness entailed in each of the conversational openers and explain the factors that make one expression "softer" or more appropriate than another. That way, learners will notice the specific words or constructions that make an expression more polite than the other. Also they will learn the right question to use and which are the cases in which they are allowed to be less polite. The results of these observations may be discussed in small teams and with the help of the teacher the students will be able to discover the linguistic, pragmatic and situational features in the utterance. Students can apply the new utterances learned in role plays or skits.


"Another important charateristic of real-life interactions in determining the pragmatic force of expressions used in daily interactions." This means we need to distinguish the different interaction purposes of a linguistic form in order to communicate effectively in the L2/FL. The student must know which is the purpose of a certain sentence, how and when should that sentence be used.

"Appropiate and inappropriate notions in academic written discourse in English is highly conventionalized." In order to be successful when writing in English, one must take into consideration features such as orgaization, rhethorical support and avoid repeating information.

EFL learners must be taught that plagiarism is a very serious issue in writing. In English they respect the author's rights so anyone is allowed to copy what another person has written. Students must be taught how to quote or at least how to use their own words to explain what they have read.


When students are learning to write, the teachers usually provide them with paragraphs and essays that model which is the correct form and organization of written expression in English. It may be really hard for students to learn all this forms at the beginning, but hopefully they will improve their writing as they practice. L1 writing has a big influence on they way they write and students have a hard time trying to see the difference between the structure used in English and the one used in L1. Students tend to write following the same rules they would when they are writing in their L1. In the course of writing instruction, learners are faced with the outcomes and not the causes of the L2, sociocultural norms and conventions and that makes it even harder for them to apply what they are expected.

Therefore, we can conclude that writing really reflects one's culture. The native speakers of English may find their rules for writing as natural and normal, but the non-native speakers find it abnormal, unnatural and sometimes even wrong because they already have a mental idea of how writing should be provided by their L1 instruction.

Whenever the teacher provides the students with explanations on why members of a particular culture do things in a certain way, the students “get a larger picture of the culture and they are able to understand and apply the rules.”

A big issue when it comes to writing in English is that some students are not able to provide enough supporting details to reinforce their thesis statement and the main idea of their paragraph, but it is important to mention that this has a reason. In some cultures it is believed that giving too many details is excessive and unnecessary and in others they may consider this as lack of humility. That's why teachers need to explain what L2 readers should expect.

There are two main kinds of reading materials provided in ESL/EFL classes. The first one is simple readings included in the textbooks and the second one includes authentic materials with different degrees of difficulty. In most classes, the textbooks are used all the time to develop and improve the learner's reading skills and vocabulary. I think teachers have the obligation to promote reading in the FL/L2. They should recommend their students to read at home anything that catches their interest so they can learn new vocabulary on their own that will help them improve in many ways. The truth is that reading is a very important tool, which will help students improve in the L2/FL.

"ESL/EFL textbooks present a limited and controlled range of ideas, vocabulary items and culturally-dependent concepts." It is not enough to read the contents of the textbook. That’s why it is suggested for teachers to use authentic texts as a complementary resource for students to learn vocabulary and even cultural facts about the ordinary life of the people of the speech community

Students may present trouble in making inferences from a text within the textbook and also problems in comprehension. They need the guidance of the teacher in order to understand, they cannot just be expected to understand everything they read because the teacher needs to tell them about the meaning of some idioms and expressions that may appear in the texts that don't mean literally what is written. Teachers must provide a considerable amount of background teaching about text interpretation and identification of the main idea.

Teachers really need to invest time on teaching reading comprehension, for the students may not get the meaning of what is implied in the text right away. Students need guidance until they are able to do things on their own, but the teacher must monitor the students’ progress.

An important task assigned to the teachers is that they should be prepared with the knowledge about culture and the structure of the language he/she is teaching. This means that besides mastering the grammar and the skills of the language, teachers need to know a great deal about the culture they are learning. They must know about the visible and the invisible culture because they will need to explain to their students the reasons why they must use certain structures in certain contexts. Students are always making questions about the culture and they must be provided with the answers that will make their comprehension of the L2/FL easier and develop their proficiency when communicating with native speakers. A teacher that isn’t prepared in the knowledge of the culture is not going to help the students very much. That’s why teachers must read and receive instruction on the culture of a language before teaching it.

Teachers must take into consideration the cultural backgrounds of the students in the class so he/she’s able to understand why they tend to behave in a certain way. Students reflect their own culture and some students for example are very quiet, while others participate way too much.

Finally, teachers should take advantage of tools and activities that combine culture and language. These activities certainly benefit the students. They need fun activities where they can learn and hopefully the knowledge will stick in their long term memory. Some activities suggested are interviews to native speakers, questionnaires about culture (in the students L1), and in also use materials such as home videos, movie clips, videotape excepts from news and T.V. shows.

About this last activity, my teammates and I agreed that when students watch a movie or a T.V. show they learn a lot about the culture of a speech community. These resources are best when they present daily life situations. We think that the sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S. is an excellent resource for students to learn about the American culture. F.R.I.E.N.D.S. presents real life situations and the behaviors/reactions people show when facing this situations. They talk about jobs, relationships, friendships, neighbors; the things we are all exposed to all the time. When watching this wonderful show, the learner can be aware of the behavior accepted in the American society and culture but also of what shouldn’t be done (in most cases). My teammates and I also concluded that the vocabulary is used in that show is very simple so all levels will be able to understand what they say. By watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S, students will learn while they are having a great time laughing at the jokes presented in the show.

Conclusion
As a conclusion, we can say that culture and language are connected like the pieces in a puzzle; one cannot be whole without the other. Teachers must provide their students with the cultural and linguistic knowledge to reach language proficiency. When we decide to study a language we are deciding to adopt a new culture in our lives. Students must be attentive observers in order to perceive how should they behave and which are the most polite and impolite ways to say things in the language they are learning, so they can prevent uncomfortable situations when interacting with native speakers. It is true that students may struggle when learning the culture, but as long as the teacher guides them they will improve. That’s why teachers must be really prepared with the knowledge and be patient with the learners. Teachers must provide fun activities that will help the students develop their language proficiency at the same time they get to know the culture of the speech community better.