Culture and Language

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.
STO
credit For scholars and laymen alike, cultural competence, i.e., 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, [url=http://www.pm4p.com/Power_Leveling/?Star-
Trek-Online-61.html]STO powerleveling[/url] so to
speak, in foreign language teaching, emphasising the role of context and the circumstances
under which language can be used accurately and appropriately, ‘fall[s] short of the mark
when it comes to actually equipping students with the cognitive skills they need in a
second-culture environment’ (Straub, 1999: 2).
In other words, since the wider context of language, that is,
Mytheon Gold
society and culture, has been reduced to a variable elusive of any
definition—as many teachers and students incessantly talk about it without knowing what its
exact meaning is—it stands to reason that the term communicative competence should become
nothing more than an empty and meretricious word, resorted to if for no other reason than to
make an “educational point.” In reality, what most teachers and students seem to lose
sight of is the fact that ‘knowledge of the grammatical system of a language [grammatical
competence] has to be complemented by understanding (sic) of culture-specific meanings
[communicative or rather cultural competence]’ (Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 4).
Of course, we are long past an era when first language acquisition and second or foreign
language learning were cast in a “behaviouristic mould,” being the products of imitation
and language “drills,”
Mytheon powerleveling and language was thought of as a
compendium of rules and strings of words and sentences used to form propositions about a
state of affairs. In the last two decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in the
study of language in relation to society, [url=http://www.pm4p.com/game_gold/?Soul-of-the-
Ultimate-Nation-1438.html]SUN Heim[/url] which has led
to a shift of focus from behaviourism and positivism to constructivism to critical theory
(see Benson & Voller, 1997: 19-25). Yet, there are still some deeply ingrained beliefs as to
the nature of language learning and teaching—beliefs that determine methodology as well as
the content of the foreign language curriculum—which have, gradually and insidiously,
contrived to undermine the teaching of culture.
One of the misconceptions that have permeated [url=http://www.pm4p.com/Power_Leveling/?
Soul-of-the-Ultimate-Nation-45.html]SUN powerleveling
[/url] foreign language teaching is the conviction that language is merely a code and, once
mastered—mainly by dint of steeping oneself into grammatical rules and some aspects of the
social context in which it is embedded—‘one language is essentially (albeit not easily)
translatable into another’ (Kramsch, 1993: 1). To a certain extent, this belief has been
instrumental in promoting various approaches to foreign language teaching—pragmatic,
sociolinguistic, and communicative—which have certainly endowed the study of language with
a social “hue”; nevertheless, paying lip service to the social dynamics that undergird
language without trying to identify and gain insights into the very fabric of society and
culture that have come to charge language in many and varied ways can only cause
misunderstanding and lead to cross-cultural miscommunication.
At any rate,
Karos Gold foreign language learning is foreign culture
learning, and, in one form or another, culture has, even implicitly, been taught in the
foreign language classroom—if for different reasons. What is debatable, though, is what is
meant by the term “culture” and how the latter is integrated into language learning and
teaching. Kramsch’s keen observation should not go unnoticed:
Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill,

Wonderking zedtacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking,
listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from day one, ready
to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the
limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make
sense of the world around them. (Kramsch, 1993: 1)
The teaching of culture is not akin to the transmission of information regarding the people
of the target community or country—even though knowledge about (let alone experience of)
the “target group” is an important ingredient (see Nostrand, 1967: 118). It would be
nothing short of ludicrous to assert that culture is merely a repository of facts and
experiences to which one can have recourse,[url=http://www.pm4p.com/Power_Leveling/?
WonderKing-Online-66.html]Wonderking powerleveling[/url]
if need be. Furthermore, what Kramsch herself seems to insinuate is that to learn a foreign
language is not merely to learn how to communicate but also to discover how much leeway the
target language allows learners to manipulate grammatical forms, sounds, and meanings, and
to reflect upon, or even flout, socially accepted norms at work both in their own or the
target culture.
There is definitely more than meets the eye, and the present paper has the aim of
unravelling the “mystery,” shedding some light on the role of teaching culture in
fostering cross-cultural understanding which transcends the boundaries of linguistic forms—
while enriching and giving far deeper meaning to what is dubbed “communicative competence”
—and runs counter to a solipsistic world view. I would like to show that the teaching of
culture has enjoyed far less “adulation” than it merits, and consider ways of
incorporating it not only into the foreign language curriculum but also into learners’
repertoire and outlook on life.[url=http://www.pm4p.com/game_gold2/?Grand-fantasia-1458-
1458.html]Grand fantasia Heim[/url] The main premise of
this paper is that we cannot go about teaching a foreign language without at least offering
some insights into its speakers’ culture. By the same token, we cannot go about fostering
“communicative competence” without taking into account the different views and
perspectives of people in different cultures which may enhance or even inhibit
communication.
After all, communication requires understanding, and understanding requires stepping into
the shoes of the foreigner and sifting her cultural baggage,
Grand
fantasia powerleveling while always ‘putting [the target] culture in
relation with one’s own’ (Kramsch, 1993: 205). Moreover, we should be cognisant of the
fact that ‘[i]f we teach language without teaching at the same time the culture in which it
operates, we are teaching meaningless symbols or symbols to which the student attaches the
wrong meaning…