UNIT 1: A sociocultural
perspective on language
and culture
Language as
sociocultural resource
Language is considered to be first
and foremost a sociocultural
resource constituted by ‘a range of
possibilities, an open-ended set of
options in behaviour that are
available to the individual in his
existence as social man’ (Halliday)
Dialogue as the
essence of language
use
language meaning is
located in the dialogic
relationship between
the historical and the
present, between the
social and the
individual.
Single- and double-voiced
utterances
Utterances in which we acknowledge the
conventional meanings of our resources, and use
them with volition to respond to the conditions
of the moment, are what Bakhtin calls
double-voiced utterances.
Culture as
sociocultural
practice
Culture is seen to reside in the meanings and
shapes that our linguistic resources have
accumulated from their past uses and with
which we approach and work through our
communicative activities.
Linguistic relativity
According to several hypotheses relativistic two
speakers of very different languages amply
conceptualized some what differently the same
phenomena, cognitive effects associated with
vocabulary and grammatical peculiarities of their
languages.
A socially constituted
linguistics
It is social knowledge, that
shapes and gives meaning to
linguistic forms.
A socially constituted approach to
the study of language and culture
with the goal of such research being not
to seek ‘the replication of uniformity, but
the organization of diversity’ (Hornberger)
The recent turn in studies of
communicative activities
Ethnomethodology, an approach to the
study of social life that considers the nature
and source of social order to be grounded in
real-world activity rather than regulated by
universal standards of rationality.
From linguistic relativity
to sociolinguistic
relativity
Languages afford users with
preferred perspectives for
encoding their lived
experiences.
Systemic functional
linguistics
Halliday views language not as a
system of abstract, decontextualised
rules but rather as fundamentally
social, constituted by a set of resources
for meaning-making
UNIT 2: The Importance Of
Teaching Culture In The
Foreign Language
Classroom
The History OF Culture Teaching
the teaching of culture as a means of ‘developing an
awareness of, and sensitivity towards, the values
and traditions of the people whose language is
being studied’ (Tucker & Lambert)
Language And Culture: What IS
Culture And Why Should IT BE
Taught?
Students need to learn the language in order to
truly appreciate the culture, but they do not need
to learn about the culture in order to truly
comprehend the language.
INCORPORATING CULTURE INTO THE FOREIGN
LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: SOME PRACTICAL
CONSIDERATIONS
According to Straub (1999), what educators should always have in mind
when teaching culture is the need to raise their students’ awareness of
their own culture, to provide them with some kind of metalanguage in
order to talk about culture, and ‘to cultivate a degree of intellectual
objectivity essential in cross-cultural analyses’
Conclusion
‘Culture should be our message to
students and language our medium’
(Peck)