PLLT Chapter.7 summary

Summary – CHAPTER7. SOCIOCULTURAL FACTORS

Culture is a way of life and the context within which we exist, think, feel, and relate to others. It is our collective identity. Culture also can be defined as the ideas, customs, skills, tools that characterize a given group of people in a given period of time. Culture establishes for each person a context of cognitive and affective behavior, a template for personal and social existence. Culture becomes highly important in the learning of a second language. A language is a part of a culture ,and a culture is a part of a language. They are both intricately interwoven.


FROM STEREOTYPES TO GENERALIZATIONS
There are stereo types according to the each country. Our cultural milieu shapes our world view in such a way that reality is thought to be objectively perceived through our own cultural pattern, and a differing perception is seen as false of “strange” and is thus oversimplified. A close-minded view of such differences often results in the maintenance of a stereotype-an oversimplification and blanket assumption. To judge a single member of a culture by overall traits of the culture is both prejudge and to misjudge that person. Possibly stereotypes devalue people from other countries. Both learners and teachers of a second language need to understand cultural differences, to recognize openly that people are not all the same beneath the skin. We can learn to perceive those differences, appreciate them, and above all to respect and value the personhood of every human being.


ATTITUDES
Attitudes develop early in childhood and are results of parents’ and peers’ attitudes, of contact with people who are “different” in any number of ways, and of interacting affective factors in the human experience. These attitudes form a part of one’s perception of self, of others, and of the culture in which one is living. It seems clear that L2 learners benefit from positive attitudes and that negative attitudes may lead to decreased motivation. Yet the teacher should know that everyone has both positive and negative attitudes and the negative attitudes can be changed, often by exposure to reality.


SECOND CULTURE ACQUISITION
Robinson-Stuart and Nocon suggested that language learners undergo culture learning as a “process, that is, as a way of perceiving, interpreting, feeling, being in the world, and relating to where one is and who one meets” culture learning is a process of creating shared meaning between cultural representatives. Since learning a L2 implies some degree of learning a second culture, it is important to understand what we mean by the process of culture learning. There are four successive stages of culture acquisition.
1. Stage 1 is a period of excitement and euphoria over the newness of the surroundings.
2. Stage 2-culture shock-emerges as individual feel the intrusion of more and more cultural differences into their own images of self and security
3. Stage 3 is one of gradual, and at first tentative and vacillating recovery.
4. Stage 4 represents near of full recovery, either assimilation or adaptation.


SOCIAL DISTANCE
Social distance refers to the cognitive and affective proximity of two cultures that come into contact within an individual. John Schumann described social distance as consisting of the following parameters: (1) Dominance, (2) Integration, (3) Cohesiveness, (4) Congruence, and (5) Permanence. He used the above factors to describe hypothetically “good” and “bad” language learning situations. Schumann’s hypothesis was that the greater the social distance between two cultures, the greater the difficulty the learner will have in learning the second language, and conversely the smaller the social distances, the better will be the language learning situation.
Acton devised a measure of perceived social distance-the Professed Difference in Attitude Questionnaire (PDAQ). According to him, when learners encounter a new culture, their acculturation process is a factor of how they perceive their own culture in relation to the culture of the target language. If learners perceived themselves as either too close to or too distant from either the target culture or the native culture, they fell into the category of “bad” language learners as measured by standard proficiency tests. The implication is that successful language learners see themselves as maintaining some distance between themselves and both cultures, not too close or not too distant.


CULTURE IN THE CLASSROOM
While most learners can indeed find positive benefits in cross-cultural living or learning experiences, a number of people experience psychological blocks and other inhibiting effects of the second culture. There are four different conceptual categories to study the cultural norms.
1) Individualism: Individualist cultures assume that any person looks primarily after his/her own and immediate family interest.
2) Power Distance: Less powerful persons in a society accept inequality in power and consider it as normal situation.
3) Uncertainty Avoidance: People within a culture are made nervous by situations which they perceive as unclear situations which they therefore try to avoid by maintaining strict codes of behavior and a belief in absolute truths.
4) Masculinity: There is maximal distinction between what men are expected to do and what women are expected to do. In this term, men are expected to be assertive, ambitious and competitive, to strive for material success.


LANGUAGE POLICY AND POLITICS
The relationship between language and society cannot be discussed without the political ramifications of language and language policy. Language policies become politicized as special interest groups vie for power and economic gain. Into this mix, English, now the major worldwide lingua franca, is the subject of international debate as policy makers struggle over the legitimization of varieties of English.

World Englishes
With the rapid growth of English as an International Language(EIL) of communication, the status of English in its varieties of what is now commonly called “World Englishes”(Kachru & Nelson 1996; Kachru 1985, 1992) and we are advised to view English in terms of a broad range of its functions and the degree of its penetration into a country’s society.

ESL and EFL
There is a problem with ESL/ EFL terminology. The multiplicity of contexts for the use of English worldwide demands a careful look at the variables of each situation before making the blanket generalization that generalization that one of two possible models, ESL or EFL, applies. In terms of degrees of acculturation, on the surface one could conclude that second language learning in a culture foreign to one’s own potentially involves the deepest form of culture acquisition.

Linguistic Imperialism and Language Right
A main issue in the linguistic imperialism debate is the devaluing of native languages through the colonial spread of English. But in recent years, there have been some signs of hope for the preservation of indigenous languages as seen, for example, in the Council of Europe’s 1988 European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, which assumes a multilingual context and support for minority languages

Language Policy and the “English Only” Debate
Another manifestation of the sociopolitical domain of second language acquisition is found in language policies around the world. Questions in this field range from the language of the education of children to the adoption of “official” status for a language in a country. Those who end up suffering from such moves toward “English only” are the already disenfranchised minority cultures.


LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND CULTURE
No discussion about cultural variables in SLA is complete without some treatment of the relationship between language and thought. Words shape our lives, however words are not the only linguistic category affecting thought. And culture is really an integral part of the interaction between language and thought. As in every other human learning experience, the L2 learner can make positive use of prior experiences to facilitate the process of learning by retaining that which is valid and valuable for second culture learning and second language learning.