language and culture
Culture has been defined as ‘the total set of beliefs, attitudes, customs, behavior and social habits of the members of a particular society’. Our culture informs us what is appropriate, what is normal, what is acceptable when dealing with other members of our society. Our culture allows us to know what to expect from others, what they will say in certain situations, and how they will say it. It allows us to know how they will act and how they will react. It is the wisdom of the ages passed down to the present. We are affected by her, and she is affected by us. Culture is in a state of constant change, gradually changing, changing the way we talk and think, the way we act and the way we react.
That culture is indelibly linked to language is undeniable, since language is a vehicle through which it is transmitted, probably its main vehicle. One observable way in which language acts as a vehicle or transmitter of culture is in the use of idiomatic language. Idioticity is possibly the most common form of language, in terms of percentages of the total. Idiomatic language, most often found in the form of sentences consisting of more than one word, often does not conform to the grammatical structure of non-idiomatic language. For example, in the phrase, ‘at liberty’, as used in the expression, ‘the general public’, or in the sentence, ‘The escaped convicts were at liberty for two weeks before being recaptured’, the preposition ‘ in ‘ appears before what appears to be an adjective, ‘big’. This seems to be in direct contradiction to the ‘normal’ place that such a part of speech occupies in a grammatically correct sentence, viz. before a noun, as in the following examples, ‘at home’, ‘at work’, ‘at the office’ et al. The phrase, ‘in general’ appearing on the page in isolation from any context that would make its meaning more transparent, has an opaque quality as far as semantic meaning is concerned, and perhaps still retains some of its opacity of meaning even within the text. context of a sentence.
For the members of the community who use such idiomatic language, there is a tacit agreement about what these phrases mean, despite their opaque quality. Languages are cultural entities.
For learners of a foreign language, any foreign language, culture imbues language with this opacity. The word table is easily understood and learned, but what about the phrase ‘make a motion’? That phrase has a cultural value that is not easily appreciated or evident to a student. The meaning does not reside in the individual words that make up the sentence. The verb ‘to table’ must initially seem meaningless to a learner. Likewise, ‘a movement’ must seem like an anachronism, having learned that movement is synonymous with the word ‘movement’.
Each culture has its own collection of phrases that are peculiar to it and whose meaning is not obvious. Were it not so, George Bernard Shaw’s adage that the United States and Great Britain are two nations separated by the same language would not have ironic appeal. We apparently speak the same language, the British and the Americans, but both varieties use many different words and have many different phrases that are often mutually unintelligible and sometimes pronounced very differently. Sometimes only the context in which a phrase or word is used is used to say angle. Sometimes even context isn’t enough. Sometimes we think we have understood when we have not.
This points to another characteristic of language linked to culture; that it exists within a larger entity, that there are localized varieties. What is understandable to a person from one region may be unintelligible to someone from another. If this is true within the community of a particular set of users of a language, how much more so must it be true for learners of that language. Many students of English, feeling competent, have gone to England only to find the language at worst totally unintelligible and at best iconic but still not quite understandable.
The “cultural weighting” of any language, in the form of idiomatic phrases, is understood by members of that cultural community, or perhaps more correctly and more narrowly, by members of that particular speech community, and conversely. not easily understood. understood by those who come from another culture or even another speech community, albeit ostensibly within the same culture.
Recognizing that students have or will have problems with ‘real’ English, both written and spoken, is vital if they are to be truly fluent and accurate in the language. Identifying the idiomatic nature of English is vital for fluent and accurate use and understanding. The word ‘idiom’, defined as ‘an expression which functions as a single unit and whose meaning cannot be resolved from its separate parts’, is often misunderstood as being more akin to the words ‘adage’, ‘proverb or ‘saying’, however. The enormity of the amount of idiomatic language contained in everyday speech and in the written word goes unnoticed by those who are not trained to differentiate between language that is idiomatic and that which is not, and it is precisely because of the omnipresent presence of this characteristic. of the language that makes it ‘invisible’ to native speakers. Culture is, as stated before, embedded in language, and vice versa. I would even go so far as to say that only through careful monitoring of her own language use is an English teacher able to separate the idiomatic from the non-idiomatic use of her mother tongue. The learner of the language may be completely unaware of its presence, and this fact, possibly more than any other, may make the learners’ English sound foreign, non-native, in both written and spoken varieties. The problem is compounded by the fact that each and every student brings the excess baggage of their own idiomatic language to their learning of English. How often do we read weird-sounding phrases in our students’ written work, phrases that are little more than literal translations of the idiomatic language of their mother tongue? I suggest we read it every day of our teaching lives. The question is: ‘How can we help students solve this main problem?’
Well, acknowledging that it’s a problem is kind of a start. Simply criticizing students’ performance by saying that their grammar is poor is totally wrong. In the experience of most teachers, the grammatical ability of students varies, it is true, but I believe that it is in the area of teaching phrases and idioms that the most ground can be covered in our attempts to improve students’ English. Help students to ‘observe fragmentations’ in language, or what has been called ‘constituent identification’.
When reading language for specific purposes, such as science, there may be little evidence of idiomatic language, although there will be some, but in other varieties idiomatic language may be an important part and students need help. in the recognition and understanding of that language.
However, the first and most important step is to recognize the nature of the beast. Even though concordant software and dictionaries based on a huge in vitro language corpus are available, teachers often turn to, or are required to turn to, textbooks that make little or no mention of idiomatic language. and, what is perhaps worse, when they do. mention it, do it in an ironic, dilettante way, treating idioms as adages and sayings, rather than as common features of language.