This document discusses language, culture and identity. It defines culture and lists some cultural parameters like individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, gender roles, time orientation and tightness. It discusses stereotypes and how language shapes thought and frames our conceptual universe. It also discusses communities of practice, identity and language learning, linguistic relativity, acculturation, culture shock, social distance, attitudes, ideology, language policy, English as a lingua franca, linguistic imperialism and teaching intercultural competence.

1. Language,Culture,and
Identity
Created by: Sona Harare

2. Defining Culture
• Culture is a way of life. It’s the context within which
we exist, think, feel, and relate to others. It's the
“glue” that binds a group of people together. Culture
is a “blueprint” that guides the behavior of people in
a community, is incubated in family life, governs our
behavior in groups, and helps us know what others
expect of us and the consequences of not living of to
those expectations.

3. Cultural Parameters
• 1. Individualism: the degree to which a culture values the needs of
the self over the group.
• 2. Power Distance: the extent to which the culture fosters equality
versus inequality in power among members of the group.
• 3. Uncertainty Avoidance: the extent to which people are
uncomfortable in unstructured, unclear, or unpredictable situation.
• 4. Gender role differentiation: the degree to which gender roles
are specific and distinct as apposed to relatively overlapping social
roles for the sexes.
• 5. Action focus: differences in valuing of “doing” versus “being”.
• 6. Space distance: differences in standards for touching, proxemics,
eye contact, and privacy.
• 7. Time orientation: the extent to which a culture values fixed vs.
fluid time concepts.
• 8. Tightness: the degree to which a culture is homogeneous.

4. Stereotypes
• What makes a text humorous or even offensive?
The answer is stereotyping. We picture other cultures in
an oversimplified manner, lumping cultural differences
into exaggerated categories, and then view every person
in a culture as possessing the same traits.
• Stereotypes abound: Japanese are inscrutable, eat raw
fish, and read anime and manga. Indians eat spicy curry
and wear turbans. Saudi Arabians are rich. Within
countries, stereotypes are the source of both
amusement and disdain: New Yorkers are in your face,
brusque, and drink Manischewitz wine. Californians are
wishy-washy, sit in hot tubs and drink white wine. Such
sometimes negatively biased caricatures derive from
one’s own culture-bound worldview.

5. Language,Thought, and Culture
• Consider the fact that your voice is so unique that it is
instantly recognizable by friends and family. It is how
you project yourself to others. Comprehending and
establishing and defining your identity.
• It has also been observed that the manner in which an
idea or assertion is stated affects the way we
conceptualize the idea (Boroditsky, 2011). If language is
intelligence, then our intellect is framed, shaped, and
organized in large part by linguistic entities. On the
other hand, many ideas, issues, inventions, and
discoveries create the need for new language, as
annual revisions of standard dictionaries show.

6. Framingour conceptualuniverse
• Words shape our lives. Lakoff’s (2004) poignant book
on farming reminds us of the importance of language
and verbal labels in molding the way people think. The
advertising world is a prime example of the use of
language to influence, persuade, and dissuade. Weasel
words tend to glorify very ordinary products into those
that are “unsurpassed” , “ultimate” , and “the right
choice”.
• Early linguistic research showed how verbal labels can
shape the way we store events for later recall.
Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter (1932) found that when
subjects were briefly exposed to simple drawings with
varying labels, later reproductions of the drawings
were influenced by the labels assigned to the figures.

7. Linguistic relativity
• The most famous early proponent of language as the
“shaper of ideas” was Benjamin Whorf (1956), who made a
strong claim for what has come to be called linguistic
determinism: “The background linguistic system (in other
words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a
reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself
the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the
individual’s mental activity”.
• Language teachers continue to recognize a more moderate
view of linguistic relativity. Wardhaugh (1976,p.74 )
ventured a positive outlook: “It appears possible to talk
about anything in any language, [to make] any observations
that need to be made about the world. Every natural
language is a rich system which readily allows its speakers
to overcome any predispositions that exist.”

8. Communities OfPractice
• By the late 1990s , with the phenomenal increase in
communications media, the ease of travel around the
world, and heightened global awareness, it became
increasingly difficult to understand sociocultural
variables in empirically based positivist terms. A
potentially fruitful model for SLA research emerged
early in the concept of communities of practice (CoP)
to more accurately examine issues of identity in L2
learning. Cognitive anthropologists Wenger (1998) not
only applied CoP to any group of people who share a
craft or profession, but also (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to
classroom of learners in educational setting.

9. Three characteristics of CoPwere posited:
• 1. Mutual engagement: Learners in a classroom
build collaborative relationships that bind the
learners together as a social entity.
• 2. Joint enterprise: learners (and teacher)
negotiate an understanding of what binds them
together as a community.
• 3. Shared repertoire: as part of its practice, the
community produces a set of commonly used
resources and practices.

10. Identity AndLanguageLearning
• The revolutionary change in defining and
understanding sociocultural dimensions of SLA
centers on the concept of identity, spearheaded
by Bonnie Norton’s (2000) seminal book on
identity and language learning.
• Identity theory represents a marked conceptual
shift in research on SLA, one that was inspired by
Vygotsky’s (1962, 1987) work on sociocultural
theory, aptly referenced in Lantolf and Beckett’s
(2009) research timeline.

11. Identity AndLanguageLearning
• By looking at the L2 learning process through the
lenses of CoP and identity theory, we turn old
models upside down, shake them loose a bit, and
remove assumptions and constraints that no
longer apply in a twenty-first century world. SLA
rarely is a matter of “second culture learning”,
since that term implies not only the monolithic
community (which does not exist), but also that
every learner identifies with a “target” culture in
the same way.

12. Historical Landmarks In Cross-Cultural Research
• For most of the twentieth century, research on the
sociocultural elements of SLA centered on issues in
acculturation, culture shock, social distance, culture
“learning”, and attitudes toward cultures beyond one’s
own, as recently documented in Risager’s (2011)
comprehensive annotated bibliography of research on
the cultural dimensions of language teaching and
learning. Most of this research viewed culture in
essentialist terms: Culture could be defined and
understood in terms of various difficulties encountered
by learners in “crossing” cultural borders and in what
some called “second culture learning”. (Seelye, 1974)

13. Acculturationand CultureShock
• L2 learning, as we saw above, almost always
involves the phenomenon of developing an
identity. The creation of a new identity is at the
heart of culture learning, or what has commonly
been called acculturation.
• For an L2 learner, understanding a new culture,
even in a “foreign” language classroom, can clash
with a person’s worldview, self-identity, and
systems of thinking, acting, feeling, and
communication. When that disruption is severe
(usually not in a “foreign” language situation)

14. Acculturationand CultureShock
• For an L2 learner, understanding a new
culture, even in a “foreign” language
classroom, can clash with a person’s
worldview, self-identity, and systems of
thinking, acting, feeling, and communication.
When that disruption is severe, a learner may
experience culture shock, a phenomenon
ranging from mild irritability to deep
psychological crisis.

15. SocialDistance
• Social distance refers__metaphorically__to the
cognitive and affective proximity of two cultures
that come into contact within an individual.
• John Schumann(1976c) described social distance
as consisting of the several possible parameters,
including the following:
• 1. Dominance, power relationships across two
cultures
• 2. The extent to which integration into a second
culture is possible
• 3. The congruency of the two cultures in question

16. Attitudes
• The postulation of theories of social distance
to account for acculturation presupposed the
significance of attitudes toward other
cultures. In Gardner and Lambert’s (1972)
studies of the effect of attitudes on language
learning, they defined motivation as a
construct made up of certain attitudes.

17. IDEOLOGY,POLICY, ANDPOLITICS
• Ideology is the body of assertions, beliefs, and aims
that constitute a sociopolitical system within a group,
culture or country.
• The relationship between language and culture cannot
overlook or underestimate the ideological ramification
of language and language policy.
• Every country has some form of explicit (official) or
implicit (unofficial) policy affecting the status of its
native language(s), and many countries include one or
more foreign languages in these policies. Ultimately
those language policies become politicized as special
interest groups vie for power and economic gain, all of
which may deeply affect an L2 learner’s identity.

18. Englishas an internationallinguafranca
• English, now the major worldwide lingua
franca, is the subject of international debate
as policy makers struggle over the
legitimization of varieties of English. Some
strands of research even suggest that English
teaching worldwide threatens to form and
elitist cultural hegemony, widening the gap
between “haves” and “have nots” (Tsui &
Tollefson, 2007; Kumaravadivelu, 2008;
Tollefson, 2011).

19. “Second”and “Foreign”Language Acquisition
• The spread of EIL (English as an International
Language) muddied the formerly clear waters
that separated what we referred to as English as
a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign
language (EFL).
• Learning ESL may be clearly defined in the case
of, say, an Arabic speaker learning English in the
United States or the United Kingdom, but not as
easily identified where English is already an
accepted and widely used language for
education, government, or business within the
country.

20. Linguistic Imperialismand Language Rights
• One of the most controversial issues to appear in the
global spread of EIL was the extent to which the
propagation of English as a medium of education,
commerce, and government “impeded literacy in
mother tongue languages . . . and thwarted social and
economic progress for those who do not learn It” ,
called attention to the potential consequences of
English teaching worldwide when Eurocentric
ideologies are embedded in instruction, having the
effect of legitimizing colonial or establishment power
and resources, and of reconstituting “cultural
inequalities between English and other languages”
(Phillipson, 1992, p.47)

21. LanguagePolicy
• Yet another manifestation of the sociopolitical
domain of second language acquisition is found
in language policy around the world. The
language of education of children, for example, is
a matter for policy: the decision by a political
entity to offer education in a designated language
or languages. Such decisions inevitably require a
judgment on the part of the policy-making body
on which language(s) is (are) deemed to be of
value for the future generation of wage earners
(and voters) in that society.

22. TEACHINGINTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE
• Issues of culture, social identity, and concomitant
ideological ramifications, as ingrained sets of behaviors and
modes of perception, become highly important in the
learning of an L2.
• Both Scarino (2009) and Kramsch (2011) offered the
perspective that while much of our attention as teachers in
SLA classroom is focused on communicative competence,
we must also be mindful of the place of intercultural
competence.
• “Intercultural competence has to do with far less
negotiable discourse words, the circulation of values and
identities across cultures, the inversions, even inventions of
meaning, often hidden behind a common illusion of
effective communication” (Kramsch, 2011, p.354).

23. InterculturalLanguageLearning
• Liddicoat recently reminded us that the role of
language educators is to “prepare language
learners for meaningful communication outside
their own cultural environment and to develop in
language learners a sense of themselves as
mediators between language and cultures”
(2011, p.837)
• Wright (2000) found that using process-oriented
tasks promoted cross-cultural adaptability.