fix the essay problem

Word Count:

ProjectA: what’s in a word?

Learning a foreign language with its culture

With the development of globalization, cross-cultural communication has spread in many aspects of people’s daily life, such as the travel aboard, transnational cooperation, and international study. Hence, the number of people learning a foreign language is exponentially increasing. With this trend, many more teachers and teaching methods helping students to learn a language appear. However, as an international student who been learning English as a language for the past 13 years, I think the best way to learn a foreign language is to know about its culture and explore its cultural background. In the article of Fatiha Guessbi “Blurring the Line between Language and Culture,” she argues that “we could not understand a culture without having direct access to its language because of their intimate connection,” which means that people are able to have the deeper understanding of a language when they are immersed in the culture. From my perspective, the overall point from the article of Fatiha Guessbi is to persuade readers that language teachers and students would benefit creating educational opportunities that do more than teach languages from textbooks.

Thus; language teaching should always contain some explicit reference to the culture, the whole from which the particular language is extracted.

Culture shapes language and language reflects and makes possible the growth and transmission of culture. Due to the relationship between language and culture that is complexly intertwined, a language learner, who is immersed in his or her target language where people around are native speakers, can absolutely learn this language better and faster than others who are just taught by school teachers. Not only because they practice more, but also because they are able to have a deeper understanding of its culture in their daily life. Under such a situation, people don’t have to translate the foreign language into our mother tongue and memorize words, phrases, grammars, mechanically, but can easily feel how foreigners talk and respond in a specific context and then imitate the speaking with comprehensive understanding of the particular culture. As we know, for a language learner, translation is a really bad idea, which means that the language learner can not learn a language well through using one language to replace another one. According to Fatiha Guessbi, because “these auxiliary communication techniques are culture-specific,” people from different societies are very likely to encounter misunderstandings and confusions on foreign language without the knowledge of culture. It is due to the fact that, when using a new language, we are facing a totally brand-new culture behind it. If we have no idea about one culture, we

People from different cultural backgrounds have their own special sayings or lingos according to the particular culture. For example, when I first came to the U.S., I could not understand why people, even the strangers, tended to say “bless you” to me when I sneezed. I had never be taught this expression in China by my English teacher who is Chinese and had no experience living abroad. Hence, I didn’t know whether should I respond or how I could respond, causing me to feel awkward at that time. Finally, after I lived in the U.S. for a period of time, I found that it just reflects the American culture and originates from a superstition. I became more comfortable with that situation. If I hadn’t been in the U.S., I wouldn’t know this expression. Therefore, if a language learner want to handle a language as well as a native speaker does, like handling the most idiomatic English, he or she is recom mended to know its specific cultural background. Otherwise, we will encounter confusion sometimes.

An individual language speaker’s effectiveness in a foreign language is directly related to his/her understanding of the culture of that language (Taylor, 1979)

Also, people from different cultural background are very likely to view or regard the terms, which has the same literal meaning, in very different ways. For example, in China, people have many different precise terms to call their relatives; almost every relatives corresponds to one specific salutation in Chinese. They distinguish the mother-side relative from father-side relatives by calling their relatives from mother side with the word “biao” in the beginning of salutations and calling those relatives from father side with started word “tang”. Nevertheless, in English, people only have very limited words to describe the relationship of family, and even some of the words are

said with the word “in-law”. This fact reflects that western people do not pay a lot of attention on the relations with relatives as Chinese do, even just consider their relatives on the legal level. The differences of language imply the different cultures between China and the U.S. Comparing to western people, Chinese people tend to put more emphasis on the relationship of big family with such a complicated “relationship net”. Moreover, not only these descried words reflect the fact that the relationship of family plays an important role to Chinese people and culture, but also these words push them continue to pay attention to relatives. It is obvious that these particular words, such as salutations, everyday sayings, and specialty, give more weight to the culture rather than the words themselves. The differences in cultures cause the differences of language. Therefore, learning a language can not be separated with learning its culture.

As we have already know, the culture affected the form and development of a language a lot. Actually, this kind of influence not only exists in two different languages. Even in some countries sharing the same language, the comparatively slight difference in cultures still produce the differences of language. To be more specific, for example, there are two kinds of well-known English over the world: American English and British English. British and American people can pronounce the same word in English in a very different way which can be classified by British accent and American accent, and also have different preferred words to express the same terms, such as “elevator” and “lift”, “surgery” and “doctor’s office”. The American English seems like more simple and easier to understand. What’s more, we also can found that the spelling also exists in the 2 kinds of accent. In American English, many words omitted letter “u”, such as “color”, “flavor”, “honor”, etc. Besides that words like “program”, ”center” also spell diversely. Last but not least, pronunciation of word also is distinctly, the word is positive, the mouth is very tight, and American English is very casual, the mouth is open and loose. British accent always be thought more official and elegant than American English, and American accent tend to be much freer. And this difference mostly due to the fact that the U.S. is a “melting pot”, mixing the cultures originated from many different countries and finally forming its own unique multi-culture and English. Hence, American English is quite like a production intertwined various cultures and languages. The reason of that happened is because the environment

the British English basically keeps the classical accent from ancient time. Just as for English, living in what region and cultural background actually decides what kind of English you learned to a large degree.

British and American English also have different greeting ways because of their different historical developments and culture. For example, almost all American people always start their daily conversation with “how are you doing today” or “what’s up”, something like that, when they meet others first time in a day. However, British people usually talk about the today’s weather in the beginning of conversation.

One of the reason why British people like talking about the weather may be a historical event of society. In the 19th century, a lot of British peasants lost their land and went bankrupt due to the enclosure movement. Therefore, the lack of land intensified people’s attention to the result of harvest. They became increasingly care about weather, the most important element that affects the harvest of crop. Therefore, when people met each others during that period, they always had a conversation about the concern of weather. This habit continues today, showing a distinct historical event of Britain and it special culture. There was a similar event happened in China; most people in China like asking others “have you eaten yet?” to start a conversation, because most people were really worried about their basic life, such as food and clothing, in the past time when the government of China didn’t have enough money and sources to sustain such a large amount of population. Thus, it is obvious that different countries has various speaking ways owing to the distinct histories and cultures. If you don’t know about its culture behind the language, you will confuse when British people talk about the weather with you or can not figure out why Chinese people always ask others about the meal. Only when foreign language learners have some basic knowledge about the culture of language, can they handle the foreign language well.

Learning a language is aimed for cross-cultural communication, and people are unable to speak a language well without understanding its culture. In cross-cultural communication, people with different backgrounds are very likely to misunderstand each other, and then make unpleasantness, even conflict, just because they are lacking of the knowledge of others’ culture. As a conclusion, when we learn a foreign language, we should try to grasp the knowledge of its culture as well at the same time. If we have opportunity live abroad, we are able to experience every aspects of their life and have a deeper understanding of its culture, which is a really good way to make the study of foreign language interesting and effective.

.