Language, Culture, and

Identity

Created by: Sona Harare

Defining Culture

• Culture is a way of life. It’s the context within which we exist, think, feel, and relate to others. It's the “glue” that binds a group of people together. Culture is a “blueprint” that guides the behavior of people in a community, is incubated in family life, governs our behavior in groups, and helps us know what others expect of us and the consequences of not living of to those expectations.

Cultural Parameters

• 1. Individualism: the degree to which a culture values the needs of the self over the group.

• 2. Power Distance: the extent to which the culture fosters equality versus inequality in power among members of the group.

• 3. Uncertainty Avoidance: the extent to which people are uncomfortable in unstructured, unclear, or unpredictable situation.

• 4. Gender role differentiation: the degree to which gender roles are specific and distinct as apposed to relatively overlapping social roles for the sexes.

• 5. Action focus: differences in valuing of “doing” versus “being”.

• 6. Space distance: differences in standards for touching, proxemics, eye contact, and privacy.

• 7. Time orientation: the extent to which a culture values fixed vs. fluid time concepts.

• 8. Tightness: the degree to which a culture is homogeneous.

Stereotypes• What makes a text humorous or even offensive? The answer is stereotyping. We picture other cultures in an oversimplified manner, lumping cultural differences into exaggerated categories, and then view every person in a culture as possessing the same traits.

• Stereotypes abound: Japanese are inscrutable, eat raw fish, and read anime and manga. Indians eat spicy curry and wear turbans. Saudi Arabians are rich. Withincountries, stereotypes are the source of both amusement and disdain: New Yorkers are in your face, brusque, and drink Manischewitz wine. Californians are wishy-washy, sit in hot tubs and drink white wine. Such sometimes negatively biased caricatures derive from one’s own culture-bound worldview.

Language, Thought, and Culture

• Consider the fact that your voice is so unique that it is instantly recognizable by friends and family. It is how you project yourself to others. Comprehending and establishing and defining your identity.

• It has also been observed that the manner in which an idea or assertion is stated affects the way we conceptualize the idea (Boroditsky, 2011). If language isintelligence, then our intellect is framed, shaped, and organized in large part by linguistic entities. On the other hand, many ideas, issues, inventions, and discoveries create the need for new language, as annual revisions of standard dictionaries show.

Framing our conceptual universe

• Words shape our lives. Lakoff’s (2004) poignant book on farming reminds us of the importance of language and verbal labels in molding the way people think. The advertising world is a prime example of the use of language to influence, persuade, and dissuade. Weasel words tend to glorify very ordinary products into those that are “unsurpassed” , “ultimate” , and “the right choice”.

• Early linguistic research showed how verbal labels can shape the way we store events for later recall. Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter (1932) found that when subjects were briefly exposed to simple drawings with varying labels, later reproductions of the drawings were influenced by the labels assigned to the figures.

Linguistic relativity

• The most famous early proponent of language as the “shaper of ideas” was Benjamin Whorf (1956), who made a strong claim for what has come to be called linguistic determinism: “The background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity”.

• Language teachers continue to recognize a more moderate view of linguistic relativity. Wardhaugh (1976,p.74 ) ventured a positive outlook: “It appears possible to talk about anything in any language, [to make] any observations that need to be made about the world. Every natural language is a rich system which readily allows its speakers to overcome any predispositions that exist.”

Communities Of Practice

• By the late 1990s , with the phenomenal increase in communications media, the ease of travel around the world, and heightened global awareness, it became increasingly difficult to understand sociocultural variables in empirically based positivist terms. A potentially fruitful model for SLA research emerged early in the concept of communities of practice (CoP) to more accurately examine issues of identity in L2 learning. Cognitive anthropologists Wenger (1998) not only applied CoP to any group of people who share a craft or profession, but also (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to classroom of learners in educational setting.

Three characteristics of CoP were posited:

• 1. Mutual engagement: Learners in a classroom build collaborative relationships that bind the learners together as a social entity.

• 2. Joint enterprise: learners (and teacher) negotiate an understanding of what binds them together as a community.

• 3. Shared repertoire: as part of its practice, the community produces a set of commonly used resources and practices.

Identity And Language Learning

• The revolutionary change in defining and understanding sociocultural dimensions of SLA centers on the concept of identity, spearheaded by Bonnie Norton’s (2000) seminal book on identity and language learning.

• Identity theory represents a marked conceptual shift in research on SLA, one that was inspired by Vygotsky’s (1962, 1987) work on sociocultural theory, aptly referenced in Lantolf and Beckett’s (2009) research timeline.

Identity And Language Learning

• By looking at the L2 learning process through the lenses of CoP and identity theory, we turn old models upside down, shake them loose a bit, and remove assumptions and constraints that no longer apply in a twenty-first century world. SLA rarely is a matter of “second culture learning”, since that term implies not only the monolithic community (which does not exist), but also that every learner identifies with a “target” culture in the same way.

Historical Landmarks In Cross-Cultural Research

• For most of the twentieth century, research on the sociocultural elements of SLA centered on issues in acculturation, culture shock, social distance, culture “learning”, and attitudes toward cultures beyond one’s own, as recently documented in Risager’s (2011) comprehensive annotated bibliography of research on the cultural dimensions of language teaching and learning. Most of this research viewed culture in essentialist terms: Culture could be defined and understood in terms of various difficulties encountered by learners in “crossing” cultural borders and in what some called “second culture learning”. (Seelye, 1974)

Acculturation and Culture Shock

• L2 learning, as we saw above, almost always involves the phenomenon of developing an identity. The creation of a new identity is at the heart of culture learning, or what has commonly been called acculturation.

• For an L2 learner, understanding a new culture, even in a “foreign” language classroom, can clash with a person’s worldview, self-identity, and systems of thinking, acting, feeling, and communication. When that disruption is severe (usually not in a “foreign” language situation)

Acculturation and Culture Shock

• For an L2 learner, understanding a new culture, even in a “foreign” language classroom, can clash with a person’s worldview, self-identity, and systems of thinking, acting, feeling, and communication. When that disruption is severe, a learner may experience culture shock, a phenomenon ranging from mild irritability to deep psychological crisis.

Social Distance

• Social distance refers__metaphorically__to the cognitive and affective proximity of two cultures that come into contact within an individual.

• John Schumann(1976c) described social distance as consisting of the several possible parameters, including the following:

• 1. Dominance, power relationships across two cultures

• 2. The extent to which integration into a second culture is possible

• 3. The congruency of the two cultures in question

Attitudes

• The postulation of theories of social distance to account for acculturation presupposed the significance of attitudes toward other cultures. In Gardner and Lambert’s (1972) studies of the effect of attitudes on language learning, they defined motivation as a construct made up of certain attitudes.

IDEOLOGY, POLICY, AND POLITICS

• Ideology is the body of assertions, beliefs, and aims that constitute a sociopolitical system within a group, culture or country.

• The relationship between language and culture cannot overlook or underestimate the ideological ramification of language and language policy.

• Every country has some form of explicit (official) or implicit (unofficial) policy affecting the status of its native language(s), and many countries include one or more foreign languages in these policies. Ultimately those language policies become politicized as special interest groups vie for power and economic gain, all of which may deeply affect an L2 learner’s identity.

English as an international lingua franca

• English, now the major worldwide lingua franca, is the subject of international debate as policy makers struggle over the legitimization of varieties of English. Some strands of research even suggest that English teaching worldwide threatens to form and elitist cultural hegemony, widening the gap between “haves” and “have nots” (Tsui & Tollefson, 2007; Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Tollefson, 2011).

“Second” and “Foreign” Language Acquisition

• The spread of EIL (English as an International Language) muddied the formerly clear waters that separated what we referred to as English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL).

• Learning ESL may be clearly defined in the case of, say, an Arabic speaker learning English in the United States or the United Kingdom, but not as easily identified where English is already an accepted and widely used language for education, government, or business within the country.

Linguistic Imperialism and Language Rights

• One of the most controversial issues to appear in the global spread of EIL was the extent to which the propagation of English as a medium of education, commerce, and government “impeded literacy in mother tongue languages . . . and thwarted social and economic progress for those who do not learn It” , called attention to the potential consequences of English teaching worldwide when Eurocentric ideologies are embedded in instruction, having the effect of legitimizing colonial or establishment power and resources, and of reconstituting “cultural inequalities between English and other languages” (Phillipson, 1992, p.47)

Language Policy

• Yet another manifestation of the sociopolitical domain of second language acquisition is found in language policy around the world. The language of education of children, for example, is a matter for policy: the decision by a political entity to offer education in a designated language or languages. Such decisions inevitably require a judgment on the part of the policy-making body on which language(s) is (are) deemed to be of value for the future generation of wage earners (and voters) in that society.

TEACHING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

• Issues of culture, social identity, and concomitant ideological ramifications, as ingrained sets of behaviors and modes of perception, become highly important in the learning of an L2.

• Both Scarino (2009) and Kramsch (2011) offered the perspective that while much of our attention as teachers in SLA classroom is focused on communicative competence, we must also be mindful of the place of interculturalcompetence.

• “Intercultural competence has to do with far less negotiable discourse words, the circulation of values and identities across cultures, the inversions, even inventions of meaning, often hidden behind a common illusion of effective communication” (Kramsch, 2011, p.354).

Intercultural Language Learning

• Liddicoat recently reminded us that the role of language educators is to “prepare language learners for meaningful communication outside their own cultural environment and to develop in language learners a sense of themselves as mediators between language and cultures”(2011, p.837)

• Wright (2000) found that using process-oriented tasks promoted cross-cultural adaptability.