This document discusses how culture can impact academic language acquisition and describes different cultural discourse patterns such as those from Asia, Latin/Romance cultures, Russia, the Arab/Semitic world, and Britain/America. It also examines how language can affect perception by influencing how people view events, physical reality, sequence, emotions, risk-taking, and decision-making. Embodied cognition is discussed as the idea that cognition is influenced by aspects of the body beyond the brain alone, and examples are given of how gestures and body positioning can impact memory and gut feelings.