Language and Culture

Culture can be a subject itself in the English classroom. While there are similarities between all cultures, as an educator I feel it is necessary to know about the different cultures in order to bring myself closer to the students and allow me to better solve cultural conflicts. Moreover, in a multicultural classroom, familiarity with cultures can promote learning motivation and improve class cohesion. I believe that languages play an important part in both preserving and evolving culture and are vital tools for intercultural communication. Learning about culture can help learners understand the history to why certain language rules exist, and thus allow them to communicate more fluently with native speakers of the target languages. As the world advances rapidly with technology more and more people are exposed to the necessity to communicate globally with more than one language.


Awareness: the relationship between language and culture

Without culture there is no language, and without language culture cannot grow and evolve. Language and culture run parallel courses - as language grows and evolves, so does culture grow and evolve. Language and culture get passed down in written and oral forms such as literature, ballads, and songs.

At SIT, one of the first classes we took was a two-week long Shock Language course. I was assigned to learn Afrikaans with Beverly Burkett in order to understand what the students go through learning a new language, as well as how they feel about learning. In the shock language learning log and reflection, I highlighted song and rules in the log because they were inputs that helped my learning the most. I also discovered that knowing the history and culture of the language “made the learning process more familiar”. Beverly passed on cultural aspects of Afrikaan through several songs. With the translated lyrics of the song “Stuur groete aan Mannetjies Roux” by Laurika Rauch, I understood the sadness of the song came from the poor condition of the country itself. Seeing that music can beautifully weave language and culture together, I concluded,
Music can really make someone understand the language and culture more; even if the lyrics are in a foreign language the feeling from the melodies can touch our souls. (L&C Aw D1)

A recent singing presentation at the San Mateo Adult School on the Fourth of July further deepened my understanding of how the language-culture relationship can be strengthened through the form of songs. 2008’s Independence Day was the first time I understood the United State’s National Anthem. As I wrote in the first paragraph of my reflective journal L&C Aw D2, I started to appreciate the purpose of singing the Star-Spangled Banner more after I learned the background information on when and why the song was written. My observation that the failure to transmit the historical event to the students due to their inability to comprehend native-like English put them in an apathetic and oppressed state when we sang the song together. The situation was the complete opposite, however, when the students were asked to sing their own national anthems – they were proud and confident. This experience lead me to become aware that while a more advanced language learner can understand more cultural aspects, the more cultural association the language learner has can also improve language learning.

In the summer of 2006, there was a workshop on the international language Esperanto. After being introduced to the basics of the language, I wrote a reflection on the experience. The following three key points summarize the reflection:
Though easy to learn and use, without a strong cultural background and a short history of roughly 120 years, only very few people accept and use Esperanto.
English speakers of different origins integrate their cultural beliefs and social identities and express a unique style of English as they speak and communicate with other English speakers.
There is a set of culturally borderless common survival words in each language that are derived from the ability to compose simple, survival questions. For example, the necessity to eat. (L&C Aw D3)
My classmate Neil O’Flaherty, who also attended the workshop, commented on my reflection, “Too late Esperantists… you missed the boat!!” This complemented my first point where Esperanto is just too new; without a unique historical trait it lacks the soul and essence of a non-fabricated language, therefore its linguistic growth is prevented. As easy and simple as Esperanto is, it is too euro-centric and fails to expand to other parts of the world in comparison to sign and body languages. Without culture and history, songs cannot be written, information beyond the grammatical rules cannot be passed on, idioms cannot be formed without history, and everything leads to the conclusion that this language cannot evolve, at least not yet. A language without culture is more or less just a dead language.


Attitude: desire to learn about and from people of other cultures

I survived well in Japan, and excelled in my job as an assistant language teacher and cultural ambassador in the JET[1] program. It was possible because I spent nearly eight years studying Japanese language, history, and culture before my departure. I had been living in culturally-diverse cities such as Vancouver, British Columbia and San Francisco, California, but the environments alone did not promote my desire to learn about cultures other than the Japanese culture. When I first came to SIT I was surprised at the openness of the people on the campus. I learned that it was the peoples’ attitude of openness that made me more aware of culture diversity and encouraged me to participate eagerly in events that would promote cultural learning, such as the student’s talent show featuring songs and dances from different countries, the international fashion show, language exchange tables during Monday lunches, and the Capoeira[2] practice sessions. Outside of the SIT campus, there were local events such as Keene’s pumpkin festival and Brattleboro’s cow parade where I learned more about American culture.

When I found out that I would be doing my SIT internship phase in Costa Rica, I panicked because I knew almost nothing about its language and culture. Prior to my departure for Costa Rica, I had an opportunity to interview my classmate Johanna Melo Fique from Colombia for my ICLT class in hope to both understand some basic cultural aspects of the Hispanic population and how others feel about teaching in a foreign environment dealing with culture shock. The interview had four parts that touched on Johanna’s past teaching experience and how she taught culture in her classroom, her expectations of teaching culture in a foreign country and her view of culture-language relationship, her idea on bringing different culture back to Colombia, and a specific technique on how she integrated culture in her lesson. At the end of part two of the transcription, Johanna said,
Anyways, I do think that language and culture are so closely related, that it’s almost impossible to work a language without working the culture. The first thing we ask each other in the classroom, “where are you from?” that makes you talk about your background, that makes you talk about you! Its impossible to just work apart from that. (L&C At D1)

Johanna’s magic words took away my anxiety about teaching students with unfamiliar cultural backgrounds and reminded me that the very first thing a teacher does in the classroom with the students is to learn about each other, including each others’ cultures. With the great awareness that I, the teacher, have the power and the opportunity to create friendly and safe opportunities to learn and explore culture in the classroom, I was thrilled to set off on my amazing cultural learning journey in Costa Rica.

In order to remember and cherish my experiences, I kept a daily diary L&C At D2 and brought my video camera with me everywhere I went while I stayed in Costa Rica. During my internship I only got to meet my students twice a week, so a big chunk of my cultural learning came from staying with a big family in Costa Rica. With three boys, the couple, the uncle, the great-aunt, and two dogs, I was completely immersed in the Tico (Costa Rican) environment. Rather than spending my time alone to tour the country as a tourist, I stuck with my host family as much as I could and learned culture and life views from them. I ate all the meals they prepared for me, and made Chinese dishes for them in return. On the grandmother’s birthday, I was introduced to their forty or so relatives and for the first time in my life saw hundreds of candies flying out of a broken piñata. I also had the opportunity to learn about the country’s economy when I went on some business runs with the host father Jorge, and the politics when the town went wild on the presidential Election Day. What I learned from the family helped me greatly in my classes because I was more aware of the culture and could better comprehend cultural differences.


Knowledge: the nature and components of language, culture, and intercultural communication

Language and culture are not static; they complement each other and help each other evolve over time. Language could be divided into three components: lexicon, grammar, and pragmatics. Depending on the nature of the culture or sub-culture, one of the language categories may evolve more than the others. For example, the traditional Japanese culture was extremely formal and highly contextual. This lead to three forms of the language: humble, normal, and honorific being formed to remind people of their social status. This cultural phenomenon contributes to the Japanese language being extremely advanced in terms of this aspect of its pragmatics. English, because of England’s long history of being a multicultural society and creating colonies in different parts of the world, has a huge lexical body with many words borrowed from other countries. Interestingly, numerous Latin-based languages such as Portuguese have developed complex grammatical systems with their wide range of tense forms.

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theories and hypotheses naturally speculate and analyze the three components of a language. In the SLA course I took at SIT, I studied the three hypotheses that helped me see the components of language that promote language acquisition: the Input Hypothesis by Krashen (1985), the Interaction Hypothesis by Long (1980), and the Output Hypothesis by Swain (1995). As I reflected on the three hypotheses as shown on page one of L&C K D1, I came to believe that each hypothesis has important limitations and it takes a combination of all three hypotheses in order to promote language and cultural learning. It is essential to receive as much native speakers’ input as possible to increase vocabulary, interact with people to stabilize grammar forms, then practice using the language in contextual situations to internalize proper usage. In my SLA study group, we further discussed the three functions of Swain’s Output Hypothesis: the “noticing/triggering” function, the hypothesis-testing function, and the metalinguistic (reflective) function. (Swain 1995, p.128)
The language learner can comprehend the meaning of the input, but to acquire the form of a language completely he must use either some or all of the 3 functions of output. (L&C K D1, p2)

Kay Kim, a member of the study group, drew the following diagram to help our group understand visually how the three output functions contribute to learning.
Another way to analyze the different components of a language is by looking at it from the four skills we use the language with: reading, listening, writing, and speaking. In the Teaching the Four Skills course at SIT, I explored and analyzed the components of these skills in relationship to input and output hypotheses from the SLA field. L&C K D2 is my final assignment for the course, created with an abstract idea to capture my understanding of the different relationships between the four skill areas. With the pinball machine as the theme and framework, I analyzed that the student, symbolized as the pinball itself, interacts with different components of the language when he or she is set off in the game of learning a language. The more interactions a student receives, like a pinball game, the higher the “results” that will be generated.

When an individual learns a new language, it is common to be going back and forth between cultures depending on the specific interactions. Confusion and frustration are unavoidable during this stage especially when the difference is of the opposite cultural context. Individuals often end up feeling “encapsulated” (Bennet, 1993), or trapped inside, between cultures as the result of two or more cultures forming simultaneously.

In my ICLT course, I had the opportunity to explore the nature of intercultural communication rather differently by analyzing a newly formed culture – the Internet culture. The Internet culture reflects much of the real world and is a great place to further understand intercultural difference and analyze intercultural communications with a cheap fee and easy access. Intercultural communication among the average American exploded in the past two decades when the impossible became possible with the internet. How likely is it to gather forty to two hundred people from different countries in a room and discuss about movies for as long as they wanted in the real physical world? In the digital world, intercultural communication happen all the time, and more importantly, with ease. Common language and interlanguage evolved from the English alphabet and technical vocabulary and formed naturally over the internet. While communication over the internet lack interactive components such as gestures and facial expression, internet users have developed new symbols to express emotions called “emoticons” such as :-) to emphasize happiness. Please refer to Page 3 of L&C K D4 for more emoticons. For our class presentation, my partner Emily Bodensteiner and I discussed that one of the advantages to communicate through email and instant messages is that the you are “able to finish expressing your ideas without getting cut off”. (L&C K D4, p1) This phenomenon allows full exchange of culturally different ideas and give people sufficient time to fully understand the content on their own pace. However, some of the younger users are lazy and overuse acronyms (L&C K D4, p2 is a list of commonly used internet acronyms) and change the spelling of words to communicate. Another important intercultural component we discussed in the presentation was “netiquette”, the rules of the internet. As shown on the PowerPoint slides of L&C K D3, netiquette was created to accommodate millions of internet users with the core principle of “If you would not do it in real life, do not do it in cyberspace.”


Skill: explore and analyze linguistic and cultural phenomena and apply these analyses to teaching context(s)

At SIT, I became more aware of cultural differences and the effects these differences have on teaching and learning in an English class. When I did my internship in Costa Rica, I experienced a culture that is more “tactile” for the first time of my life; it was strange to be almost kissed on the cheek by strangers. I wanted to share, from my personal experience, the importance of culture awareness with my students. On Valentines Day I designed a lesson on the different body languages around the world, and the lesson was digitally recorded by my institutional supervisor Oscar Chavez who was observing my lesson. The highlighted version of the video shows the setup I prepared for the lesson and the lesson itself. (L&C S M1) There were four posters of different continents and on each poster there was information about four of five countries from that continent. (Information taken from the book “Gestures” by Roger E. Axtell) For this activity, the students grouped up and went around the different posters to gather information and record findings on a handout I created. (L&C S D1) We then sat in a circle and shared the learning experience using the Way of Council[3] format. The sharing experience was rich and fascinating for both the students and myself. I was pleased to hear my student Lisa debunking the information she read about Colombians not being shy based on her personal experience, as you can see in L&C S M1.

I may have learned much about Costa Rica’s culture, but there are always different layers of cultures to learn – from big to small: culture of the nation, culture of the group, and culture of an individual. While culture on the national level is usually general and can be learned by reading books and watching TV, group and individual cultures require personal experiences to learn. I encountered a big group and individual ‘culture bump’ towards the end of my internship and wrote about it for my ICLT internship assignment (L&C S D2). In an activity to practice using superlatives, I took my night class to the only open store in town – the pharmacy. My students quickly and naturally gathered around the shelf with all the different kinds of condoms and started comparing the different brands. I was shocked and embarrassed to learn that such a conversation was discussed seamlessly among the mix of male and female, as well as underage and adult students. When we got back to the class and discussed the experience, no matter how hard I tried the conversation kept on going back to the “most interesting” condoms in the store. The discussion went out of hand, and as I described more in detail at the end of page 1 of the document, a middle-aged student insulted a teenage student with an inappropriate comment in poor English.

I was not able to interpret the cause of the incident at the time, but having worked with mainly Latino students at the San Mateo Adult School I began to understand the nature of the incident. As I wrote this sub-competency and referred back to the document I was surprised that I quickly came up with a new interpretation of the incident.
Now that I think about the situation again, what David said was probably more of an advice rather than insult, something like “You will want to ask your mom to teach you how to use a condom after you turn 18”, which makes sense as Mary pointed out that in the Latino culture “eldership” is respected. I have experienced many eldership situations in my Literacy class, which I can refer to personally now. Eldership also explains why Roberto didn’t talk back and just left the class silently – he respected the advise of the elder. I probably connected his poor English too rashly at the time the incident happened, as the words he said were “condom, turn 18, use, mom”. (L&C S D2)

At the end of the document, I wrote that I most likely misinterpreted the situation both culturally and linguistically. Culturally, I did not understand the importance of what my internship supervisor Mary Scholl called “eldership” in the Costa Rican culture, and misread the victim’s reaction at the time of the incident. Linguistically I responded poorly by connecting the key words spoken in English wrongly and framed it with the worst situation possible.

In November of 2006 I visited Japan and stayed with my old neighbor, Mr. Katagiri. His son Masayoshi was studying English for the high school entrance exam so I thought I could be of some help to his study. When I saw a few sample exam questions, which can be seen in L&C S D3, I found out that I could not fill in the blanks despite the fact that my Japanese is quite fluent. I felt the urge to analyze this phenomenon and relate it to why I thought Japanese couldn’t speak English freely. From the nine ideas I discussed in the document, I concluded that Japanese are trying too hard to memorize “perfect” sentences such as “You must send for the doctor.” rather than creating simple sentences such as “Please get the doctor”. My classmate Aya Sasaki (a Japanese MAT 37) read my writing and responded, “the problem is that students are not given practice time to use what they learned.” It is really a shame to see million students wasting valuable time to memorize impractical sentences rather than spending time to practice utilizing the basics of English. From this experience I discovered an alternative way to assess language learning that I wish to apply in a classroom in the near future:
“Instead of having students to fill in the blank from a bad translated sentence, give the target phrase only and have the students use it to create their own sentence. It’s much more important to know if one can synthesis original ideas.” (L&C S D3)

It is my hope that as I teach and learn about cultures and languages, I will become more skillful in analyzing specific and unique conflicts happening in my class, and attend them with more appropriate and mature actions.

Conclusion
The relationship between language and culture is a beauty in itself, and is sophisticated but rewarding to explore. There are four goals I wish to reach to improve myself in this competency. First of all, I feel the need to understand more about the culture of the language that I am teaching, American culture. I have recently come across a book called “The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy” by E.D Hirsch, Jr, Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefill. This 586-page dictionary lists most of the important American historical and cultural events in alphabetical order. I wish to go through this book in the near future and incorporate more American culture in my current teaching. My second goal is to revisit Pat Moran’s “Teaching Culture” textbook and try to apply more theories in my teaching practices. The third goal is to explore more of the world and learn in depth different cultures by teaching English in those places. I have already started this goal by teaching different groups of Europeans and Middle-eastern people at a summer camp in Switzerland. My last goal is to improve my Spanish, hopefully to a competent level in the next three years, to help me understand Latino cultures and communicate with more people around the globe.

[1] The JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme is a Japanese government program to bring native English speakers in Japanese classrooms
[2] Capoeira is a martial art and dance form, originated from the Brazilian slaves
[3] The Way of Council is a format where only one person can speak at a time, and all members of the group take turn to speak from their heart while others listen from their hearts