Sociocultural Factors In Sla

SOCIOCULTURAL FACTORS in sla
Jared Raymond
SangithaMothayapan
FaizAmir
Pang FeiMian
Chui Jun Hui
Lu Sirui
Sun Jing
University of Malaya KL

CULTURE: DEFINITIONS & THEORIES
a way of life; the context within how people exist, think, feel, and relate to others.
the “glue” that binds a group of people together
ideas, customs, skills, arts and tools that characterized a given group of people in a given period of time.
PBET 2113 Group 5 (TESL) Sem 2 AY 2009-2010, Department of Language & Literacy Education, Faculty of Education, Universiti Malaya KL

a blue print that guides the behavior of people in a community. It helps to know how far we can go as individuals and our responsibilities to the group. Larson and Smalley ( 1972 )
a dynamic system of rules, explicit and implicit, established by groups in order to ensure their survival, involving attitudes, values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors, shared by a group but harbored differently by each explicit unit within the group, communicated across generations, relatively stable but with the potential to change across time. Matsumoto ( 2000)

The meaningful universe in which each human being exists is not a universal reality, but ‘a category of reality’ consisting of selectively organized features considered significant by the society in which he lives. Condon (1973, p. 17)
Culture is needed to fulfill certain biological and psychological needs in people. No society exists without a culture.

People tend to believe that their own reality is the “correct” perception.
Perception is subjective. Misunderstandings are likely to occur between members of different culture.
Language is a part of culture, and culture is a part of language. These two cannot be separated without losing the significance of either one.

STEREOTYPES OR GENERALIZATIONS?
In the bias of our own culture-bound worldview, we often picture other culture in an oversimplified manner, lumping cultural differences into exaggerated categories, and view every person in a culture as possessing stereotypical traits.
Stereotype formed because our cultural milieu shapes our worldview in such a way that reality is thought to be objectively perceived through our own cultural pattern. A different perception is seen as either false or strange.

Implication: SLA/SLL
Both teacher and learner of a second language need to understand cultural differences, to recognize openly that people are not all the same beneath the skin.
A teacher or a researcher must strive to understand the identities of the learners in terms of their sociocultural background.

ATTITUDES of Learners
towards the culture or language
towards the members of the cultural groups whose language they are learning
influenced by parents’ and peers’ attitudes which forms a perception of oneself, of others, and of the culture in which one is living
Negative attitudes can be changed – exposure and reality

SECOND CULTURE ACQUISITION
Language learners undergo culture learning.
Culture learning:
- a process of creating shared meaning
between cultural representatives
- experiential
- continues over years of language learning,
and penetrates deeply into one’s patterns
of thinking, feeling, and acting

Stages of Culture Acquisition
Period of excitement & euphoria over the
newness of the surroundings (fascination with the new culture)
Culture shock (differences between old & new culture create anxiety)
Anomie (feelings of social uncertainty; begin to accept the differences)
Recovery:
first tentative and vacillating
full recovery (assimilation or adaptation, acceptance, self-confidence in the “new” person)

SOCIAL DISTANCE
The cognitive and affective proximity of two cultures that come to contact within an individual.Parameters of social distance : Schumann (1976c)1) Dominance - is the L2 group politically, culturally,technically, or economically dominant, non-dominant, or subordinate in relation to the TL group? 2) Integration - Is the integration pattern of the L2 group assimilation, acculturation, or reservation?

3) Cohesiveness - Is the L2 group cohesive?
4)Congruence– Are the cultures of the two groups congruent-similar in their value and belief systems?
5) Permanence - What is the L2 group’s intended length of residence in the target language area?
Schumann’s hypothesis: the greater the social distance between two cultures, the greater the difficulty in learning the second language.

Social distance:William Acton(1979)
devised a measure of perceived social distance, instead of trying to measure actual social distance
When learners encounter a new culture, their acculturation process is a factor of how they perceive their own culture in relation to the culture of the target language.

optimalperceived social distance ratio
- typifies the “good” language learner.
- maintaining some distance between
themselves and both cultures.
Supported Lambert’s (1967) contention that mastery of the foreign language takes place hand in hand with feelings of anomie or homelessness, where learners have moved away from their native culture but are still not completely assimilated into or adjusted to the target culture.

Svanes (1987,1988)
found that university foreign students studying in Norway appeared to achieve higher language proficiency if they had “a balanced and critical attitude to the host people” (1988,p.368) as opposed to uncritical admiration for all aspects of the target language

Teaching intercultural competence

Why do we need to pay attention to the intercultural competence?
Cultural differences may cause learners to feel alienation during the process of learning a second language.
We need to be sensitive to the fragility of students by using techniques that promote cultural understanding to lessen the blocks on the way of studying a second language.

Researches to improve cultural understanding in classroom
Sociocultural strategies , Process-oriented tasks, Internet-based culture portfolios Interviews of native speakers of the target language , the using of drama in class room.
Role play assists teacher in the process of acculturation in the classroom.
Studying second language where that language is spoken natively is the best way to facilitate acculturation.

4 conceptual categories to study the cultural norms
Individualism
Power distance
Uncertainty avoidance
Masculinity.

LANGUAGE POLICY AND POLITICS
Language Policy : what a government does officially through legislation, court decisions or policy to determine how languages are used, to cultivate language skills needed to meet national priorities or to establish the rights of individuals or groups to use and maintain languages.
Many countries have a language policy designed to favour or discourage the use of a particular language or set of languages.
Types of Language Policies
Policies of assimilation
Policies of non-intervention
Policies of differentiated legal status
Policies of promotion of the official language

World Englishes
World Englishes refers to the emergence of localized or indigenized varieties of English, especially varieties that have developed in nations colonized by England or the United States. Indian English, Singapore English, and Philippine English are commonly referred to as examples of World Englishes, as each of these varieties has native speakers.
In certain countries, learning English does not involve taking on a new culture. For example is learning English in India.

ESL and EFL
ESL is usually used when talking about primary and secondary schools, in order to clarify English is not the students' first language, but their second.
EFL indicates the use of English in a non–English-speaking region.
Study can occur either in the student's home country, as part of the normal school curriculum or, for the more privileged minority, in an Anglophone country that they visit as educational tourist immediately before or after graduating from university

Language Imperialism and Language Rights
Language imperialism involves the transfer of a dominant language to other peoples.
The transfer is essentially a demonstration of power, traditionally, military power but also, in the modern world, economic power and aspects of the dominant culture are usually transferred along with the language.
Linguistic imperialism is often seen in the context of cultural imperialism.

“ENGLISH ONLY” debate
There is a debate in United States of the widespread move to establish English as an ‘official language’.
English-only movement, also known as Official English movement, refers to a political movement for the use only of the English language in official government operations through the establishing of English as the only official language in the United States. There have been various unrelated incarnations of the movement throughout American history

LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND CULTURE
The relationship between language and thought is very significant.
ideas, issues, inventions and discoveries create the need for new words.
words, language and verbal labels shape our lives and the way people think. Example: the advertising world use language to shape, persuade and dissuade.
George Lakoff (2004) reminds us of the importance of language and verbal labels in shaping the way people think. Verbal labels can shape the way we store events for later recall.

Besides words, sentence structure also affects the meaning.
For example, after viewing a film of an automobile accident,
subjects were asked questions like:
A: “Did you see the broken headlight?”
B: “Did you see a broken headlight?”
The presence of the definite article led subjects to believe that there must have been a broken headlight whether they saw it or not.

Culture,language & thought
an integral part of the interaction between language and thought.
culture patterns of cognition and customs are sometimes explicitly coded in language.
lexical items may reflect something about the intersection of culture and cognition.

Culture in the language classroom
Culture is the foundation of communication.
Culture and communication are inseparable
Inject culture into the classroom through lessons and activities
Linguistics - concepts of language analysis that are the basis of inter-cultural communication
Psychology - concepts we use in understanding people’s motivation and behaviour
Sociology and anthropology - influenced our study of behaviour
All these influences form social values in different communities

Source: Brown, H. Douglas. 2007. Principles of
Language Learning and Teaching, 5th Edition.
White Plains, NY: Pearson Education. Chapter 7.
Created for: PBET 2113 Participants (TESL)
Semester 2, AY 2009-2010
Department of Language & Literacy
Faculty of Education
University of Malaya KL
Created by: Jared Raymond, SangithaMothayapan,
FaizAmir, Lu Sirui, Pang FeiMian,
Sun Jing, Chui Jun Hui,
Facilitator: Jessie Grace U. Rubrico, PhD

Sociocultural Factors In Sla

by Jessie Grace Rubrico on Feb 17, 2010

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