Language and Culture

lunes, 3 de agosto de 2020

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TASK 4- FINAL EVALUATION

LINDA LICETH BURGOS FAJARDO

Código: 1056031249

Grupo:

511036_18

Tutor:

ASTRID YANIRA LEMOS

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA (UNAD)

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

CALIFORNIA

2020

Although the relationship between language and culture is not very clear, the language depends on where we or our family live and what we are used to. The way we communicate to others depends on our traditions and the way we are used to relate to other people. It depends so much on the city and country, since many countries are used to different things. It is meaningful teaching with love and understanding the problems many students go through on a daily basis. Teaching goes beyond explaining a topic in front of a group of students, teaching is wanting the best for the learners and looking for strategies so that they overcome their obstacles with our help and in this way, they can achieve meaningful learning. Nobody can judge others by their origin or roots because learning from different cultures is something wonderful. In addition, it is vitally important to know how to communicate with other people orally or in writing. To be able to teach adequately, it is necessary to know a little about the culture of the language that is going to be taught, but to learn about the culture it is essential to know the language to be able to communicate and learn in a more significant way.

The relationship between language and culture and culture

The relationship between language and culture and culture

Individual written essay:

Language is intertwined with culture. When a person starts learning a new language he has to be aware of the importance of learning about its culture too. This is a matter of knowing that they will go always together; you cannot understand its language without going deeper to its language; due to it represents a symbol of social identity. And it is that language and culture have a wide perspective that they work with every single part of the society. Both culture and language very important because of three main aspects: the relation between them, the influence of culture in the process of learning a foreign language and the cultural expressions countries have through language.

Firstly, the language depends on where we or our family live and what they and we are used to. It is very important for everyone to know the way we communicate to others taking into account our traditions and the way we are used to relate to other people. Many people from different countries around the world can communicate differently, but it is respectable because it is what they have been used to and have been doing for a long time; from their ancestors.

Secondly, the influence of culture in the process of learning a foreign language depends so much on the place we talk about, since not all the countries are used to the same things. For example, Colombians are used to doing things that Mexicans, Europeans, or Americans are not. But in spite of everything, it is a matter of having good communication to be able to understand other points of view and be flexible with things that can sometimes seem interesting to us from foreigners and others not so much.

Thirdly, our language expresses something about your feelings about how you interact with others. When talking about education, many countries show great respect for the teacher. American teachers notice this in the way students express themselves. For example, the way they greet or communicate with each other. There are many cultural expressions that countries have through language, and that is how they let their people communicate with others.

In conclusion, as we can see all of the aspects of culture take us to language; so they are always combined that there is no way to learn a language without knowing about the culture where the language comes from; all of the expressions they normally use, things they like to say, not to say, celebrations that involve the language and many more. In sociolinguistics it is seen as the main factor for communication it means one language equal one culture; this one represents daily life duties, such as behavior, celebrations, customs, food typical things and more, the words which we usually associate culture with.

PowToon presentation:

https://www.powtoon.com/c/fz3sJPfPbwJ/1/m

Interview to an English teacher:

https://youtu.be/dLa_NfFAwTM

Topic of the interview: Importance of the Language and Culture when Teaching English.

Date and time it was performed: Wednesday, June 24th at 5:00 pm.

Place where it was performed: California, USA via Zoom.

Interviewed name: Kiran Malavade.

Profession: English Teacher.

Courses in charge: English for Native Speakers in the Cañada Community College.

Summary of the answers and comments:

What do you think is a relationship between language and culture?

According to professor Malavade, “Our language expresses our culture”. Although the relationship is not very clear, she says that the language depends on where we or our family live and what they and we are used to. Also, the way we communicate to others depends on our traditions and the way we are used to relate to other people. She explains it saying, “how I speak with my parents is different than how I speak with my white husband, you know, and that's my culture like my culture is, you know, all of those things together. Right, so I think that's true for our students that we see in community college that their culture is not just one thing. Like, you're from Colombia, it's, you know, maybe the particular place in Colombia, you know, your particular sometimes we talk about even our family has a particular culture. Right. Every family has its own culture and so that there's that too. So, I think. It's a very complex relationship to things, but it's almost impossible to separate language and culture. I think”.

What is the influence of culture in the process of foreign language process?

It depends so much on the city and country, since many countries are used to different things. When for example students go to the United States to learn a new language, they should get used to the teaching method in one way or another. This also involves meeting students from other countries where the teacher is the one who has the right to speak during the explanation without giving the students the opportunity to participate actively, or where the teacher is very demanding or short-tempered. American education, on the other hand, tends to be more comprehensive with the student, where the teacher will always want to help the learner and will look for ways to help students to achieve autonomous and meaningful learning. This is how Malavade explains it, “So glad you know so I think it's just an issue of understanding that culture does impact not just how we interact in the classroom with the teacher how we might interact with each other. So, if I ask a student to do group work, but in their culture that's not comfortable. Like, it feels like you're cheating if you do group work, right. So, you know, it's a good idea to have a conversation with students and talk about what's explicit. This is my expectations. This is why I think it's good and be respectful of students coming in the door with a lot of their own ideas about learning so that that is because it's going to come up in some way, whether we acknowledge it or not. It's part of the you know what's going on in the classroom”.

Which cultural expressions do you know countries have a through language?

“We're cultural expression, you know, your language you're trying to express something about your feelings about how you interact with others. So those things coming out, you know, in our writing in our speech, in the classroom kinds of thing”, says Mavalade in the interview. When talking about education, many countries show great respect for the teacher. American teachers notice this in the way students express themselves. For example, the way they greet or communicate with each other. Kiran says that despite the fact that she tries to make her students feel confident in their classes by calling her or her name, it is difficult for them to feel that confidence because, according to them, it may be a lack of respect towards the teacher. And from my point of view it has always seemed strange to call the teacher in class by his name because, as Kiran says, I feel that it is a lack of respect, but here it is just normal. However, it is difficult for me due to the lack of habit, since in Colombia you always say professor to whom the class is guiding. “ I always tell everybody in my class on the first day when I'm teaching, face to face, please call me Kiran. It's what I'm and when I was in college, I really appreciated that my college professors told me to call them by their first name and I like that you don't do that in high school, but it feels like mature to do and college. So, I tell that to my students, but my students, many students, you know who are educated at least partly in other countries could be Latin America could be Asia. It could be anywhere really students who are educated in other countries, typically don't feel comfortable with that. And you know, I think that's a cultural expression of language right so culturally. I'm not comfortable calling you curate. They'll call me, you know, Professor, that's fine. You know, whatever. Maybe sometimes they'll call me, Professor Kiran, but really, they just stick to Professor and that is their cultural expression you know their way of saying in their language. I'm trying to be respectful of you because you're the teacher. I don't feel comfortable calling you. It's not that they're trying to you know disrespect me. I'm telling them, call me, Kiran. They want to show respect and that is their language of doing it, you know”, says Mavalade.

So why do you think it is important to have an oral tradition in a country?

“An oral tradition is so much more alive than a written tradition, so oral tradition is constantly changing” states Mavalade. The oral tradition allows us to communicate with other people and keep relationships with others. In addition, this allow us to move forward and learn new things as time passes. The oral tradition not only defines a person, but a group of people, a country, a culture, since through them we identify ourselves as people, and we learn from others in our countries and abroad as well. This is what Mavalade explains it, “I'm thinking about with the COVID you know this term social distancing, and this is something that I was joking with my husband. I think that you know 2030 years ago if the same restriction was given to us, you know, stay six feet away. They called it social distancing; we would have called it something else. Really use those that kind of terminology. Right. Which is evolving and changing. And so, an oral tradition is so crucial, crucial to our culture, we need to keep that alive… So, we have to be okay with using the oral tradition to allow us to make changes in and because the oral tradition more closely represents the culture a written tradition is for the educated. In most countries, including America that's going to be the privileged people and an oral tradition is for everybody. You know, and so everybody has a claim on that and every many accesses that. So, it's important that we keep that alive”.

Do we teach language using culture or do we teach culture using language?

“Both right. Um, you know, I don't think it's possible to teach culture without language. You know, I don't think. And I don't mean just written language. I mean, oral language. I don't think it's possible to teach the culture without the language. But I suppose it's possible to teach the language without the culture… those things are so connected” answers Mavalade. It is true, the two things go together, and their relationship is so strong that it is simply difficult to separate them. For example, in Colombia, some people can learn English without knowing much about the American culture, and vice versa, but if we finally want to travel to learn more and have a knowledge of that culture, it is essential to know the language.

Do you take into account culture in the strategies you use in your English classes. Can you give me some examples?

As Mavalade expresses, teachers need many strategies to be able to understand the oak trees that our students go through and to help them in time. They have relation with their with culture, and the teachers are obliged to help them because we are the ones who are charge of helping our students, and in our hands it is to identify shortcomings in time. “I usually have some kind of assignment, especially in the earlier classes in our class, I think it was just a small survey kind of thing about yourself. Right. But usually I want to give students an opportunity to tell me you know this is my experience in with education before because I don't know… If I see a student doing something that seems weird. I'm not understanding what's going on here, Linda, you know, your assignments seem like you're off on this, tell me a little bit about why you did it this way, and then you're going to explain to me. Oh, because in my country, I learned done it at it and now I understand. Let me think about how I can you know give you different instructions so that it would be clear for you or I see Linda that you don't really like to work in groups. Tell me about that, you know, and then I could understand why. So, I think it's important, it comes back to that teaching with love, right, it comes down to, you know, understanding that our students are not blank slates. They come in the door with a lot of information and knowledge and culture and in order to promote learning”.

Write a significant reflection about the answers of the interviewed:

The Professor Malavade is an excellent Teacher with whom I have had the chance to learn English abroad in a Community College. Through her interview, I confirm the importance of teaching with love and understanding the problems many students go through on a daily basis. Teaching goes beyond explaining a topic in front of a group of students, teaching is wanting the best for the learners and looking for strategies so that they overcome their obstacles with our help and in this way, they can achieve meaningful learning. On the other hand, she stresses the importance of not judging students by their origin or roots because learning from different cultures is something wonderful. In addition, it is vitally important to know how to communicate with other people orally or in writing. To be able to teach adequately, it is necessary to know a little about the culture of the language that is going to be taught, but to learn about the culture it is essential to know the language to be able to communicate and learn in a more significant way.

Conclusion about the Unit 1:

Language and culture are two related aspects, since language depends on culture and vice versa. The language reflects the experiences and the way of seeing the world of the people. Each town, city or place and therefore its inhabitants form their own way of being in life. People create a cultural model that is built from the relationships that the community establish among themselves, with nature, the relationships with other communities and with what they consider important. It is necessary to understand what others are used to and learn through experiences.

Culture, Language and Education

Investigation about the oral cultural traditions of the chosen countries

Mind Map

Cultures and traditions

United States:

In the United States, oral tradition is used to talk about stories based on biblical stories. Some hip-hop and rap artists engage in improvising poetry to tell stories of their ancestors. Between 1870, love and attachment for folklore was born in the USA. Artists such as Daniel Garrison, Robert H. Lowie, and Paul Radin began writing myths and traditions in the 1980s by looking at American museums and taking American mythology into account in order to reconstruct the history and culture of Native Americans through traditions. oral.

Some Native American tales that have been collected over time speak about myths of the origin of the world and of humans, some are etiological myths that explain peculiarities of animals such as wolves, birds and sometimes plants, some others tell stories of heroes and their trips to other worlds or also to heaven and stories of animal-human marriages are also told.

African American folklore was discovered until after the civil war in the 21st century. Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), is a regional writer who through his songs and his sayings shows his interest in African American folklore. Harris published six collections of animal stories inspired by African American folklore in the United States. During 1860, interest in another genre of African American folklore was stimulated, despite the fact that some African American folk songs were somewhat functional. During this time, slaves created new work songs to collect cotton, plow, shed corn, and other work done in the fields.

At that time, oral cultural traditions in the USA were governed by rules. Special languages and scenarios with flexible structures used to be used to aid composition, retention and performance. Oral traditions were characterized by their expressive power that varies within limitations that respond to different environments and performance circumstances.

Australia:

From generation to generation The Tjapwurung, an Aboriginal people in South Australia, shared the story of this bird hunt. The story of the Tjapwurung tradition of birds conveys how people used to chase giant animals while volcanoes in the area were erupting at the same time. In societies like the Klamath Aboriginal Australians and people as well, created the conditions necessary for the preservation of oral histories for millennia in the past 200 years: specialized storytellers and relative cultural isolation. It should be noted that the stories between them were transmitted verbally from generation to generation.

Australia is also characterized by telling some orals of the oldest stories in the world that were told for more than seven millennia. Some of them are memories of the time when sea levels rose after the last great ice age, a process that ended about 7,000 years ago in Australia. On the other hand, in pre-literary societies, oral histories transmitted a variety of human knowledge and experiences as survival aspects of how to find water and shelter, or what to eat and where to find food in order to survive.

Their dances, songs, songs, legends, stories and presentations are characteristic of their transmitted knowledge, and they were diverse creations since the aboriginal people did not have a common language. Some of their stories were accompanied by diagrams drawn in the sand and then erased. Through their songs they expressed who they were, where they came from and their relationship with history.

New Zeland:

Their laments, love poems, war songs and prayers developed a mythology to explain their past and the legends of her gods and tribal heroes. Many Europeans collected some of these poems and stories and copied them in the Maori language. The most picturesque myths and legends were translated into English, published and read by children of Pakeha (Europeans), in such a way that they became known among the general population.

For Maori culture, it was difficult to distinguish written literature between text and interpretation, since its oratory involved voice, facial expression, and gestures. They transmitted legends that are known today, making the events described contemporary. Their traditional music is still known and they are characterized by the importance of their words in poetry and music. McLean and Orbell specified three types of waiata (songs): waiata tangi (mourning, for the dead and other types of loss or misfortune), waiata aroha (songs about love, both sexual and place or kinship), and waiata whaiaaipo ( songs of courtship or praise of the beloved). In addition, there are pao (gossip songs), poi (songs with balls attached to linen strings, rhythmically balanced), oriori (songs for young children to help them learn their heritage after the war), and karanga (performed by women for welcoming or bidding farewell to visitors at the marae). Some songs are recited instead of sung. These include karakia (enchantment invoking a power to protect), paatere (chants of women in rebuttal of slander to threaten detractors), kaioraora (expressions of hatred and revenge), and haka (song of rhythmic movements, patterns, and gestures fierce).

Reflection

Culture and its traditions are not only important in certain countries, but they are important for the whole world. It is the way in which people express their feelings, the way of perceiving the world, nature and its significant moments during their lives. It is beautiful how many traditions remain interacted through the years and how people have passed them on from generation to generation. There are beautiful songs, very beautiful writings, which despite being many times translated from one language to another, leave a clear message and convey to the reader the fact that at a certain time they were real and significant.

I consider important the fact that values, beliefs, customs and tastes continue to be transmitted through traditions depending on the place, since this creates an identity for people and their loved ones. This is demonstrated by Gkonou in his article Interwoven: Culture, language, and learning strategies says, “Culture is often seen as the human-made part of our environment (Oxford, 2014) or the software of the mind (Hofstede, 2001) - the shared attributes (ie, common history, attitudes, values, behaviors, practices, and artifacts) of a group ”(Gkonou, 405). As the passage mentions, sometimes despite the fact that people are far from their home cities, friends and families, they continue to keep their traditions far from home through the cooking of their typical meals, songs that belong to their country. or celebrations that take place in their places of origin and that is precisely what leads to having a sense of belonging despite the distance or hours that separate them.

Moreover, it is very important that families continue teaching these kinds of traditions to prevent them from ending due to lack of interest, since the strength of the traditions depends on the frequency in which people continue practicing them. It is beautiful that from a young age people adapt this type of things and grow without forgetting their roots. Also, that they express their thoughts, feelings, the Menara in which they see the world, the language they speak and the art of appreciating what surrounds us. That people together preserve the historical legacy and feel proud where they come from. Culture is self-love and love for our loved ones as it allows us to learn from what our ancestors had to live through both difficult times and those that represented great happiness for them.

Conclusions about Unit 2

Culture is a legacy and that is why it must transmit the teachings for the following generations, which allow us to transmit for the care of the mental and bodily health of all people. Culture is strength, power, identity and love because it is what defines us as people and as a community. Culture allows us to remember who we are, the proper way to express ourselves and love each other. We are linked to it because it is this that allows us to maintain a balance and move forward through the years and the problems we have at some point.

Conclusions

Importance of the course Language and Culture

Since long time ago, language, beliefs, customs and knowledge have been combined to satisfy our need for communication. Language is the mean of communication of vital importance for all humans, through it people express their ideas, emotions and feelings. Every community aspires for its members to know and learn their language because the community reflects through speeches to which society they belong.

Language is a cultural element, since the both together, the culture and the language are part of the symbolic world of the society under study. In any cultural system, its practices, patterns and codes are expressed through language and it is in this dialectical relationship that language reflects and models the world.