Language And Language: The Development Of Language Teaching And Learning

Culture can be defined as the behaviours and belief characteristics of a particular social, ethnic,

One definition of culture from the sheet “What is Culture?” is: “culture…designates what we pay attention to and what we ignore.”

Culture is considered as “the beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place,

When I searched for the definition of the culture, I found many definitions, some of them:

Culture can be defined as an inherited lens of shared values, ideas, meanings and beliefs through which the members of a society perceive the world they live in (McAvoy and Donaldson 1990).

The term culture is described as ‘a verb’. However it is explained that culture is difficult to define as it can be associated in different ways by different people. Some people think of culture as a thing while others term it as a set of beliefs,

As you can see, definitions of culture vary according to the focus of interest, the unit of analysis and the disciplinary approach (psychology, anthropology, sociology, geography etc.)

The World Languages curriculum consists of four Essential standards, including “Interpersonal”, “Interpretive”, “Presentational”, and “Culture” which are delivered in one semester. In regards to the last strand, the students are required to build an understanding of the practices, perspectives and products of different cultures and societies. Likewise, the students is required to compare their own culture and the target culture.. It is expected to teach and prepare our student to compete in a global society and help them to expand their knowledge of the world. This knowledge implies to teach concepts that are obviously very diverse and complex and require an extra effort from students and teachers. To complicate things, most of our students lack the

This paper intends to display a summary of the article “Culture in Second Language Teaching” by Elizabeth Peterson and Bronwyn Coltrane, of Center for Applied Linguistics. In detail, it discusses the attached relation among culture and language and the implementation of instructional strategies for teaching the second language through culture to improve students’ linguistic comprehension. According to this article, Culture has many different dimensions which include ideas, customs, skills, arts, and tools that characterize a group of people in each period; it is moreover the views, principles, and material things that form our way of life.

The “American Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century” considers language to be “the primary vehicle for expressing cultural perspectives” and affirms that “the study of a language provides opportunities for students to develop insights in a culture that are available in no other way” (the language educator, ACTFL, 32) It implies that teaching or learning a second language goes with teaching or learning a second culture. Language acquisition is then implied to be culture acquisition. According to the ACTFL standards, “the true content of the foreign language course is not the grammar and vocabulary of the language, but the cultures expressed through that language.” We are then tempted to raise questions on the cultural identity of fluent bilingual speakers or polyglots. If learning a second language is learning or acquiring a second culture, does proficiency in a second language rhyme with proficiency in a second culture? If this can be answered yes, how do learners manage their first culture in their process to second language and culture proficiency?

The word culture is used to describe anything that human beings work to achieve. Thus culture is both what we grow and we make, both with our hands and with our minds. It includes our houses, our tools, our cities and towns, our arts, crafts, customs, our games, sports, entertainment, music, literature, and food. It also includes our corporate bodies and institutions like families, churches, and governments;

Culture can be defined in many ways due to the fact that everyone can have their own distinct and traditional beliefs and values. “ Culture is fluid, it is not a static entity which one takes out of the box on occasion. It is with us daily” (Cultural Handout). Someone’s culture is set as the characteristics of the group practices in language, religion, types of food, social traits and habits, and the distinct arts and music. There are a variety of different cultures for example, Western Culture, Eastern Culture, Latin Culture, Middle Eastern Culture, and African Culture. All of these different cultures have their own ideas, values, and individualism, laws that are implied, civil rights, and even technology. In our, “ Culture Handout” culture is defined as the tool of the mind, “ it is an individual’s way seeing and interacting within the world. It encompasses one’s values systems, beliefs, and perceptions of the world around them. Race, socio-economic class gender, sexual orientation, ability, geographic location, age, religion language, etc. all impact the formation of culture, but these various context are not culture” (Cultural Handout).

Culture, originally derived from Latin culture which means “tending or “maintaining”, has multiple and diverse definitions nowadays.

Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1962) identify over 150 scientific definitions of the concept of culture. Indeed, many authors have tried to define culture and this is why there are so many definitions and that a unique one is hard to find. First of all, Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) assume that culture is a suite of patterns, implicit and explicit, “of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts” (p.47). Later, Hofstede adds that culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1991, p.51). This definition is the most widely accepted one amongst practitioners. For Winthrop (1991), culture is the distinctive models of thoughts, actions and values that composed members of a society or a social group. In other words,

It discussed that language is used as an instrument to express meaning, feelings and thoughts. On the other hand, culture is considered as the material production and through it a group of people can represent itself. It talks about the awareness of cross-culture in foreign language learning. Foreign language learning extends learners understanding towards foreign culture and social phenomenon. This chapter also touched the objectives of culture in foreign language learning. The learning of foreign language in socio-cultural contexts and cognitive and affective consequences of culture learning are also discussed in this chapter. It elaborates the concept of the cognitive and affective outcomes of cultural learning that affective outcomes considered as learning outcomes of cultural study and cognitive outcomes would be related with mind. At the end of the chapter, it has described that how foreign language effects on the culture of learners and it explained its some reasons about that concept. The next chapter elaborates the research design, methods and the procedure of data