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7. Sociocultural Factors

1) Culture: definitions and theories

: Rules, Groups, units, Attitudes, values, beliefs, norms and behaviors shared by a group

* Communicated across generations

: John Donne (1624), "no man is an island, entire of itself"

: no society exists without a culture

: culture establishes for each person a context of cognitive and affective behavior / template for personal and social existence

: perception, though, is always subjective

↳ misunderstandings are therefore likely to occur between members of different cultures

: a language is a part of a culture, and a culture is a part of a language

: the acquisition of a second language is also the acquisition of a second culture

: ecumenical approach to culture... see culture framed more in constructivist terms

2) Stereotypes or Generalizations

: if people recognize and understand differing worldviews, they will usually adopt a positive and open-minded attitude toward cross-cultural differences.

: A closed-minded view of such differences often results in the maintenance of a stereotype-an oversimplification and blanker assumption

: to judge a single member of a culture by overall traits of the culture is both to prejudge and to misjudge that person

: a critical awareness of the complex nature of cultural understanding

: culture bias -> viewing every person in a culture as possessing stereotypical straits

3) Attitudes

: attitudes develop early in childhood and are the result 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

: form a apart of one's perception of self, of others, and of the culture in which one is living

: Gardner and Lambert(1972)

↳ studies of the effect of attitudes on language learning, they defined motivation as a construct made up of certain attitudes. The most important of these is group-specific, the attitude learners have toward the members of the cultural group whose language they are learning

: positive attitudes toward itself, the negative language group, and the target language group enhanced proficiency

: teacher needs to be aware that everyone has both positive and negative attitudes

4) Second culture acquisition

: important to understand what we mean by the process of culture learning

: language learners undergo culture learning as a 'process, that is, as a way of perceiving, interpreting, feeling, being in the world'

: second identity.... this creation of a new identity... acculturation

: disruption is severe... person may experience culture shock

: culture shock is associated with feelings of estrangement, anger, hostility, indecision, frustration, unhappiness, sadness, loneliness, homesickness, and even physical illness

: underneath the familiar exterior there are vast differences

: as soon as this newness wears off and the cognitive and affective contradictions of the foreign culture mount up, they become disoriented

* culture shock as the second of four successive stages of culture acquisition

stage 1. excitement and euphoria over the newness

stage 2. culture shock

stage 3. accept the differences (L2 mastery occurs, optimal distance)

stage 4. near or full recovery (assimilation or adaptation)

5) Social distance

: cognitive and affective proximity of two cultures that come into contact within an individual

: dissimilarity between two cultures

John Schuman (1976)

* good language learning context (p.197)

: the L2 group is nondominant in relation to the TL group, both groups desire assimilation (or at least acculturation) for the L2 group, low enclosure is the goal of both groups, the two cultures are congruent, the L2 group is small and noncohesive, both groups have positive attitudes toward each other, and the L2 group intends to remain in the target language area for a long time

: the greater the social distance between two cultures, the greater the difficulty the learner will have in learning the second language (Schumann, 2002)

*Willian Action (1979)-perceived social distance

: human beings perceive the culture environment through the filters and screens of their own worldview and then act upon that perception

: acculturation process is a factor of how they perceive their own culture in relation to the culture of the target language

: Professed Difference in Attitude Questionnaire (PDAQ)

↳ measure of perceived social distance

1. distance between themselves and their countrymen in general

2. distance between themselves and members of the target countrymen in general

3. distance between their countrymen and members of the target culture

: successful language learners see themselves as maintaining some distance between themselves and both cultures

: Stage 3 may provide not only the optimal distance but the optimal cognitive and affective tension to produce the necessary pressure to acquire the language

: Brown(1980)-optimal distance model

↳ adult who fails to master a second language in a second culture may for a host of reasons have failed to synchronize linguistic and cultural development

↳ culturally based critical-period hypothesis (stages of acculturation, anomie, social distance, and perceived social distance)

↳ recovery stages are also crucial periods of acquisition

6) Teaching intercultural competence

: we need to be sensitive to the fragility of students by using techniques that promote cultural understanding

*Geert Hofstede(1986)-conceptualizing mismatches.... cultural norms of fifty different countries

1. individualism: a collectivist society is tightly integrated; an individualist society is loosely integrated

2. power distance: all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others

3. uncertainty avoidance: the extent to which people within a culture are made nervous by situation they perceive as unstructured, unclear, or unpredicable...

4. masculinity: opposes femininity

* collectivist societies vs. individualist societies

6.1 Language policy and politics

: every country has come form of explicit, "official," or implicit, "unofficial," policy affecting the status of its native language and one or more foreign languages

6.2 World English

: English as an international language (EIL)

: this process of nativization or "indigenization" of English has spread from the inner circle of countries to an outer circle of countries

: we are advised to view English in terms of a broad range of its functions and the degree of its penetration into a county's society

6.3 ESL and EFL

: 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 one of two possible models, ESL or EFL, applies

: second language learning in a culture foreign to one’s own potentially involves the deepest form of culture acquisition

6.4 Linguistic imperialism and language rights

: linguistic imperialism or ‘linguicism’

: cultural inequalities between English and other languages

: a main issue in this term is the devaluing of native languages through the colonial spread of English

: one of the most worthy causes we can espouse is the preservation of diversity among human beings

6.5 Language policy and the "English Only" debate

: history indicates that restricting language rights can be divisive and lead to segregationist tendencies in a society

7. Language, Thought, and Culture

: manner in which an idea or “fact” is stated affects the way we conceptualize the idea

7.1 Framing our conceptual universal

① words shapes our lives

② framing reminds us of the importance of language and verbal labels in shaping the way people think

: Ausubel's meaningful cognitive structures

③ the way a sentence is structured will affect nuances of meanings

: Did you see the broken headlight? or Did you see a broken headlight?

④ culture is really an integral part of the interaction between language and thought

: perhapes those forms shape one’s perception of others in relation to self

⑤ lexical items may reflect something about the intersection of culture and cognition

7.2 The Whorfian hypothesis

7.3 Culture in the language classroom