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Week 7: Response to "Culture and Psychology"


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Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion,  and knowledge -Plato
According to the National Standards for Foreign Language Education project (1996), students cannot truly master a new language until they have mastered the cultural context in which the new language occurs. This means that understanding a new culture is an important element in achieving success in second language acquisition. 

Culture has been defined by shared knowledge and meaning that is derived through processes of interaction and communication. Cultural psychology is an interdisciplinary field that unites psychologist, anthropologist, linguists, and philosophers for a common pursuit: the study of how cultural meaning, practices, and institutions influence and reflect individual human psychologies.

 In the ELs classroom, we can find different cultures and behaviors that we need to understand. Diversity is the only feature of ESL classrooms. According to Douglas (2000), there are four different dimensions of language. There are competence and performance; comprehension and production; nature and nurture; and universal grammar. Three questions need to be considered before analyzing the structure of a language:

  1. What are the rules or principles that predict how sounds are made and how are they used (phonology-patterning of sounds)?
  2. How do sound sequences convey meaning and how are meaningful sound sequences strung together to form words (morphology-patterning of sound sequences and words)?
  3. How are words strung together to form phrases and sentences (patterning of phrases and sentences)
Culture not only changes people's values and habits but also affects people's language and behaviors. Cultural knowledge is crucial in achieving linguistic proficiency, and the culture of a society can be changed depending upon the language used. Second language learning involves a number of different dimensions, including grammatical competence, communicative competence, language proficiency, and cultural understanding. (Thanasoulas, 2001).

Teachers can: provide culturally learning materials, using common proverbs and transferred tools, apply the role play as a sociocultural approach, view students as a cultural resources, and use technology to help students gain cultural information. 







Comments

  1. Margaret SamuelsonFebruary 21, 2019 at 1:32 PM

    Good suggestions of what teachers can do in incorporating culture into teaching language. You wrote some profound things about the changes one goes through in achieving success in learning another language. I like your quotes by Kennedy and Plato also. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete

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