LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
FINAL ACTIVITY



ALEXANDER CARVAJAL-
CODE: 72254610

GRUPO:
551036A_612


TUTOR:
CARLOS ALBERTO PEÑA












UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA
BACHELOR DEGREE IN ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

JULY 2019




INTRODUCTION




    Language is the most powerful way in communication world. It improves the quality of life and shows how people from different places live and think. Because of sociability of human being, language is one of the vital factors that influence human life progress. Language and culture link together but also act as a significant feature in intercommunication so we can claim that language is a vital factor in cultural interaction. The relationship between language and culture is inevitable. They are inter-related and impact on each other in different ways. Kramsch identifies three ways how language and culture are bound together. First, language expresses cultural reality (with words people express facts and ideas but also reflect their attitudes). Second, language embodies cultural reality (people give meaning to their experience through the means of communication). And finally, language symbolizes cultural reality (people view their language as a symbol of their social identity).
    Through this essay we can understand how this relationship works, how is developed inside the educational environments.


THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE



DO WE TEACH LANGUAGE USING CULTURE OR DO WE TEACH CULTURE USING LANGUAGE?

BY Alexander Carvajal Urrego

      Culture includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs and other capacities and abilities acquired by man as a member of society, this means that everything that man has created both material and spiritual is part of the culture, all the achievements made by man or everything that exceeds the biological nature comes to make culture.
       Anthropologically speaking, culture is everything that identifies a social group; are the set of beliefs and behaviors, ranging from ethics to folkloric, it includes the moral and the habits acquired within said group. It is the meeting of the material and the immaterial what defines the way of life of a society, finally according to Kramsch (1993), culture refers to ‘membership in a discourse community that shares a common system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating and action’ (p. 127).
       In other hand, language is a set of symbols being used mainly for communication. The symbols may be spoken or written. Language is an aspect of human behavior. In written form, it is a long-term record of knowledge from one generation to the next while in spoken form it is a means of communication. Language is the key aspect of human intelligence. As stated by Noam Chomsky, a language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.
     Language and culture are closely related and interactive. Damen (1987) argues that culture is transmitted and meant in great part through language; cultural patterns in turn are reflected and applied in language, in fact, many teachers design their lesson plans, applying this concept.
     From the beginning of the course, teachers expose to the student to the different aspects of culture of the language, showing the culture in its popular aspect and in its most formal. It requires making a detailed examination of their own knowledge to be able to clearly distinguish between stereotypes and what are characteristic features of the culture and its people to avoid falling into exaggeration these traits and the trivialization of the cultural elements. At this point, teachers expects that students learn something about the way of life of whose speaks the language through the teaching of the culture using its language.
      Because of this, the foreign language classrooms have the responsibility to teach students about other cultures to break those cultural stereotypes that many students learn from an early age. This idea is supported by the CEFR when it says: “Empirical knowledge related to daily life (organization of the day, food, means of transport, communication and information), in the public or private spheres, is, for its part, equal essential for carrying out language activities in a foreign language. The knowledge of values ​​and beliefs shared by social groups from other countries and regions such as, for example, religious beliefs, taboos, common history assumed, etc. It is essential for intercultural communication”.
     In the daily experience of teaching, a language there is a mixture of different cultures and cultural models that make learning the new language meaningful, not just for reach an understanding of who the other is but to understand their way of seeing and behave in different situations
     Claire Kramsh  says that in a language class "culture is created and lived through dialogue between the teacher and the students and between them "(1993, 47), for her, the verbal exchange goes beyond copying certain cultural context, as this is being taught in a linguistic and cultural context different from the original one. A new culture is being created, imperceptibly, that of the language classroom, with the unique idiosyncrasies of each student and teacher, knowledgeable about their culture, apprentices, and diffusers of the new one they are discovering.
     Nowadays, classes and their books must be go further of grammar and translation exercises, teachers must maintain the art of conversation showing many of the cultural aspects of the language, entirely according with Perkins, when he said, “language doesn’t exist outside a cultural context” (Perkins, 1988, p. 25).

Powtoon Presentation.



Interview with Mrs. Karen Acosta
( Bachelor degree in basic and pre-school teaching).



CONCLUSIONS ABOUT UNIT 1.

     Language is used to maintain and convey culture and culture gradually converts to personality; and all personalities, all together, form culture. Culture cannot form by itself. Language and culture are intertwined to such an extent that one cannot survive without the other. The most sensible feature of culture is that it forms unwarily; forming culture warily is impossible. No culture by itself is complete unless linked with other cultures. Cultures have mutual effects on each other especially cultures that are neighbor. Not only no culture has priority over others but also they complement each other perfectly. Different cultures may have different interpretations. We can conclude that language and culture are intricately interwoven to one another and cannot be separated. One of the best features of culture is that it is hard or sometimes impossible to be translated and clearly expressed through another language. Each culture can be completely defined just through its own language. 



CULTURE,LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION


MIND MAP ABOUT THE INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE




About the oral traditions and cultural of New Zealand.

NEW ZEALAND.





     The colonization of this country began about a thousand years before the arrival of the first Europeans. The first town that settled in New Zealand came from Eastern Polynesia: The Maori. Legend has it that the discovery of the country occurred in Kupe, which is given the name of Aotearoa:
"Land of the great white cloud."
    Before writing, oral transmission stories and oratory captured many of the stories of the origins of Aotearoa and the creation of the world,thus for the Maori people, was Kupe, who discovered Aoetearoa, his people, who lived in a land called Hawaiiki, subsisted essentially with fishing; When one day their fishermen arrived empty handed back home, tragedy was chewed. Legend has it that an octopus snatched the fishermen's capture and threatened the starvation of the entire clan. The wise Kupe went in search of the octopus and pursued it to the high seas; He ended up arriving at Aoetearoa, where his search ceased. Later, his people would follow his instructions and go canoeing in search of these lands, which would end up settling.


     According to Maori mythology: God Rangi (Father Sky) and the Goddess Pope (Mother Earth) were the first gods, who lay together to create the rest of the gods, their progeny: Tane, god of the jungle, Rongo, god of cultivated plants, Tangaoa, god of fish and reptiles, Huamia, god of wild plants, Tu, god of war and Tawhiri, god of storms.

      Rangi and Papa lived facing each other in an indivisible embrace, from which their children could not escape, but Tane, the eldest of six brothers, grew tired of living in darkness, enclosed between his sky father and his earth mother. He was the cause of their separation, pushing his father to his head and his mother with his feet to break that hug.  He decided to turn away from them and, doing so, created the world of light (Te Ao Mārama), the world of today.


     After this, Tane placed the Sun and the Moon in the firmament, and then created the first woman, Hine, with whom he married, from whose union his sons were born who would be the first Polynesians.
   Tawhiri became very angry with his brother Tane because he did not want his parents separated and he punished him by creating great hurricanes and storms over Tane's forests.
   There are, for example, the origin of the New Zealand island or the story of how Maui fished the North Island:
    Māui-tikitiki-a-Taranga was a daring and intelligent demigod who liked to push the limits. When his brothers planned to exclude him from his fishing trip, Māui hid himself in the front of the canoe and showed himself only when they were already out to sea. On that fishing trip, Maui fished his largest prey, the North Island.Mount Hikurangi, located in the East Cape on the North Island, is said to have been the first part of the Māui fish that emerged from the sea. This mountain is sacred to the members of the local Ngāti Porou tribe, who are
considered direct descendants of Māui.

      One of the most outstanding curiosity of all these stories, is that many of them are represented in tattoos. The Maori Indians tattooed their faces to distinguish which tribe they belonged to, but they marked their skin with the stories of legends and their battles. Stories and tattoos that passed, like inheritance, from parents to children.


     They used the tattoo, or "Moko" or "Ta Moko" as they call it there, as a necessary element to understand their origins.
     This custom and tradition has remained to this day, where Maori tattoos are not only decorative elements, but for those who wear them, they have a unique meaning and give them a very special strength.
    You can mark your body skin with “Moko” if you want, but not your face, “Moko” for the face is forbidden, is just for ancient members of the tribes or direct descendants.
     Most of this rich oral tradition of the Maori people was collected by European scholars at the end of the 19th century, aware that this people was destined to disappear as a result of the wars and diseases brought from the continent. Some of the most important legends were published then, and many of them became part of the national consciousness. Almost all the literary material was grouped in the libraries and was considered an emblem of the historical archive. The Maori culture have been embraced since then, by European intellectuals.
     Shortly after the arrival of the Europeans in New Zealand, the story and Maori legends of oral transmission were completed with stories written by the first travelers, such as those of Captain James Cook, who visited the country in 1769. During the first hundred years of European settlements (from 1820 to 1920), the most important texts were those corresponding to newspapers or true stories that spoke of the life of the pioneers, as is the case of The first year of the settlement of Canterbury (1863) by Samuel Butler.
     In 1830, the first book was published in New Zealand. By the twentieth century, the authors were expanding their literature to deal with land issues, geographical isolation and the emergence of a national identity
     Maori people always has been a very spiritual people. Their love and respect for the territory that surrounds them, and their faith in the elements of nature, has made this culture one of the strongest in history, they knew how to earn the respect of the old English settlers, who not only failed to impose their culture, but accepted the Maori culture and allowed the coexistence of both on the island (today the official languages of New Zealand they are both English and Maori). The British Crown signed in 1840 an agreement with the main Maori chiefs by which the New Zealand islands formally became a colony. The agreement, known as the Waitangi Treaty, is still discussed today because there have been two versions, one in Maori and one in English, with a considerably different content.
      Before the signing of the treaty, British merchants, governors and missionaries lived on the island and, although they were convinced of the superiority of their civilization, they were fascinated and admired with many of the cultural customs of the islands. They lived with the tribes and some married their wives. This contrasts with the situation in neighboring Australia, where the British despised Aboriginal culture from the start.
   The teaching is mostly taught in English and as a result, New Zealand has become an alternative country to learn and improve this language, with a culture and traditions different from the Anglo-Saxon European countries. In some institutions the Maori language is used, because schools were nationalized in Maori in 1989 to safeguard their language and customs.
    Maori Kura Kaupapa primary schools have Maori as their primary language of instruction, and education is based on the culture and values ​​of this aboriginal people. They tend to cover the year from study 1 to year 8 and less widespread are the Wharekura that welcome students up to the year 13. The Wananga are institutions of higher education based on Maori principles and which promotes training in the Maori Language. With this strategy the State demonstrated that it was possible to make two systems compatible with a shared curriculum; it is estimated that there are 50,000 Maori who speak their native language fluently. The New Zealanders today share with pride, the cultural richness of Maori heritage, in many Maraes (headquarters of meetings of the Maori), there they continue telling myths and legends, the call to all this group of stories, purakas.

Conclusions about unit 2.
    Oral culture, in particular, is a form of culture that was historically transmitted by word of mouth or through oral transmission in the context of specific communities that share the use of one language as a means of communication and expression. Oral culture expressions are seen as natural reinforces of what make a collective distinct. Oral culture is part of the set of elements that structure life in the name of ‘tradition’ and that also helps to make sense of the present. Through tradition, it brings the past into the present.

    Oral culture permeates our expression.There are expressions whose wisdom has to be in sync with our wisdom, through the study of the use of oral cultural expressions we can learn about people’s livingness and how they use language to socially help to construct the present and the future.


Conclusions: Importance of the course Language and Culture.
  

   Through this course we have noticed,the circumstances in which culture plays a fundamental role in teaching a foreign language,we can`t pretend to teach a language ignoring the cultural context of that language,students are expected to learn information about a country or people, their lives, their history, their institutions, or their customs or about the cultural icons these people have produced, such as their literature, their art, their architecture, or their music. 

    Thus to support the intercultural learning process, foreign language teachers need additional knowledge, attitudes, competencies and skills. They need to be acquainted with basic insights from cultural anthropology, culture learning theory and intercultural communication and need to be willing to teach intercultural competence and know how to do so (Edelhoff, 1993; Willems, 2002).

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