Sociocultural perspective of language

1. Language is a sociocultural resource.

From the viewpoint of ‘linguistics applied’ language is considered as a group of abstract systems that becomes significant with the practices of the communities and the contexts where linguistics elements are used. Associated to the language concept is the “culture”, considered fundamental as we cannot separate them within the sociocultural perspective on human action. Language is the essence of social life and the channel through we communicate with each other using linguistic symbols. By means of language games (Wittgenstein, 1963) we articulate and manage our individual identities, interpersonal relationships, and memberships in our social groups and communities using language, to talk, establish and share goals, activities, thoughts, intentions, in different stages along our lives. We can say that through language we experience the world, and this transforms the language in a social action, and the most sociocultural resource constituted by ‘a range of possibilities, an open-ended set of options in behavior that are available to the individual in his existence as social man (Halliday, 1973: 49).

2. Theories about language and culture

Cognitive development and processes of theory formation and change in science are similar. Science proposes an interactive relation between language and cognition. The “theory theory”, assumes that very young children and even babies can achieve inference, induction, and logical reasoning and they have abstract representations of the world taken from direct perceptual experience or action representations. In relation to language and thought we find a classic opposition between the Piagetian and Chomsky’s views  The first one argues that language development is motivated by the cognitive and conceptual development, while the second one considers that cognitive structure itself is innate rather than constructed or developed. 

3. How do we understand language in relation to learning?

The way how we understand language affects what happens in the classroom and the ways in which learners begin to understand the relationship between their own languages and the languages they are or want to learn. A language learning program can be focused: 1) on the code; 2) on the interpretation and creation of meaning; or 3) as a social practice. In the first case the code models a theory of 

language in which the relationship between two languages is simply code replacement where the only difference is a difference in words. The meaning would turn language learning as a system of personal engagement with a new world, where learners necessarily engage with diversity at a personal level. And the social practice focus would provide students with opportunities to go beyond what they already know and to learn to engage with unplanned and unpredictable aspects of language.

 4. And how do we understand culture?

Culture can be understood as a body of knowledge --that can be seen in several ways-- of which people have about a particular society. These ways are: 1) as knowledge about cultural artifacts or works of art; 2) as knowledge about places and institutions; 3) as knowledge about events and symbols; 4) as knowledge about ways of living; 4) as information and a set of the learnable rules which can be mastered by students. However, culture is not simply a body of knowledge, but a framework in which people live their lives and communicate shared meanings with each other.

5. How to be a good language learner?

Defining the concept of Culture is not so easy; we cannot separate culture from ethnicity and nationality, even people define and interpret these terms differently depending on the sociocultural context they are situated in (Lantolf, 2000). Language must be taught and learned within a cultural background that might be different from the native culture; a good language learner must be in capacity to know the rules of the specific learning environment and behave consequently, and to consider different cultural values and beliefs, attributed to learning in general and to plurilingualism and language learning in particular, because these are central in how language learning is pursued. God language learners are able to manage the emotional and motivational challenges of language learning effectively. As Stern (1983, p. 411–412) explains: “classroom learning as well as immersion in the target language environment each entail specific affective problems which have been characterized as language shock and stress, and as culture shock and stress.” 

Good language learners have a positive attitude, energy and persistence towards themselves as language learners, towards language and language learning in general, and towards the language they are trying to learn, its speakers and its culture. According to Stern (1983), language learning is a process that can be traumatic and lead to language shock and culture shock. According to Hofstede (1997, p. 207) culture shock can be caused by the fact that appropriate behavior, language, underlying beliefs, values, and attitudes are questioned and need to be re-negotiated in a new cultural context: “In a way, the visitor in a foreign culture has to “In a way, the visitor in a foreign culture has to return to the mental stage of an infant, in which he or she has to learn the simplest things over again.

References:

Bowerman,  M. and, Levinson, S. (ed.). Theories, language, and culture: Whorf without wincing. pp. 45-69. In: Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge University Press.

Griffiths, C. (ed.) Lessons from Good Language Learners. pp. 131-141. Cambridge University Press.

Carmen Esperanza Castañeda
Language and Culture 551036
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