Chapter 7

• Culture

  A way of life<|>A "blueprint" that guides the behaviour 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 up to those expectations<|>The ideas, customs, skills, arts, and tools that characterize a given group of people in a given period of time<|>A dynamic system of rules, explicit and implicit, established by groups in order to ensure their survival, involving attitudes, values, beliefs, norms, and behaviours, shared by a group but harboured differently by each specific unit within the group, communicated across generations, relatively stable but with the potential to change across time
• Culture includes attitudes, values, and beliefs that vary within and across cultures
• Similarity: fluidity of culture
• Stereotype

  An oversimplification and blanket assumption<|>A stereotype assigns group characteristics to individuals purely on the basis of their cultural membership<|>A stereotype is almost always inaccurate because of the dynamic, contextualized nature of culture
• What does this mean for educators?

  • Both learners and teachers recognize openly that people are not all the same beneath the skin
  • Language classrooms can celebrate cultural and individual differences, and even engage in a critical analysis of the use and origin of stereotypes
  • Understand the identities of our learners in terms of their sociocultural background
  • Understand their unique life's experiences
  • Turn perception into appreciation
• Weasel words

  Words that tend to glorify very ordinary products into those that are "unsurpassed," "ultimate," and "the right choice"
• Food that has been sapped of most of its nutrients by the manufacturing process are now "enriched" and "fortified"
• In a grocery store there are no "small" or even "medium" eggs, only "large" (which now seem sort of average), "extra large," and maybe "jumbo"
• Verbal labels can shape the way we store events for later recall
• Linguistic Relativity


  The question of whether language reflects cultural world view and the way speakers think or whether language shapes cognition and affect
• Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

  Linguistic Determinism (stronger claim): Language influences perceptions, thought, and thus influences behavior<|>Linguistic Relativity (weaker claim): Different cultures think differently because of the differences in their languages
• Investigating the relationship between language and thought can be a real challenge because the most obvious way to access thought is through language
• The only evidence that the thought pattern of the speakers are different is through the language that they use
• Color Terms


  Whorf said that it is difficult to identify colors which your language doesn't have a name for. But, the Dani (a New Guinea tribe) use only two color terms (dark and light) and it was found they still could recognize/distinguish the subtle colors that their language had no name for (e.g. pale blue vs turquoise)
• Object Terms

  Navajo verbs is determined by the shape of the object (long/short, thick/thin, round/not etc.). Navajo-speaking children are faster at categorizing by shape than English-speaking children. Navajo children groups them into shape while English children puts it in colors.
• Community of Practice

  A sociolinguists use the term to capture the complexities of what it means to belong to a social group like the burnouts (clique in school)<|>A community of practice usually develops around the activities which group members engage in together, share the same concerns, goals and attitudes<|>Some can be long term (e.g. family) and some can be temporary (e.g. curriculum club)
• Acculturation

  The creation of a new identity<|>Reorientation of thinking, feeling, and communication
• Culture Shock

  Understanding a new culture can clash with a person's worldview, self-identity, and systems of thinking, acting, feeling, and communication<|>Culture shock may be experienced by feelings of estrangement, anger, hostility, indecision, frustration, unhappiness, sadness, loneliness, homesickness, and even physical illness
• Attitudes

  Research states positive attitudes enhances proficiency<|>Negative attitudes usually emerge from one's indirect exposure to a culture or group through television, movies, news media, books, and other sources that may be less than reliable<|>Teachers can aid in dispelling myths about other cultures, and replacing them with an accurate understanding of the other culture as one that is different from one's own, yet to be respected and valued