TESL 0100: Unit 4 Reflection - Languaculture and English

TESL 0100 Unit 4 Reflection: Languaculture and English

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For this week’s blogpost, I’d like to discuss the term “languaculture” and some questions that came to me regarding this concept. Brown and Lee (2015) refer to this term as on of their eight principles behind second language acquisition (SLA). According to them (2015) “language and culture are intricately intertwined, and often an L2 is so deeply rooted in a culture that it is not quickly and easily discerned or internalized by a learner.” (Brown & Lee, 2015, p.81) This essentially is what languaculture is all about. It’s the idea that language and culture are essentially inseparable, meaning that in order to learn a language and fully understand it, one must also learn about the culture from where the language originates.

Personally, I have experienced this myself when studying Japanese. For instance, when declining an offer, or showing disinterest in something, or simply saying “no”, the polite way to do so is to answer with an incomplete sentence that trails off, usually along the lines of “I’d like to, but…” 「それはちょっと。。。」. Here, the listener is expected to understand that the person is declining and so would end it at that.  Now in English, this would be considered to be an incomplete utterance, and simply just the person hesitating to finish their sentence. However, in Japanese this is perfectly acceptable; in fact the sentence isn’t supposed be completed at all! The reason for this syntactic structure is rooted in the fact that in Japanese culture, being direct when refusing someone can be seen as disrespectful. Therefore, in order to come across politely, it is better to avoid declining someone directly.  This certainly differs from the notion in Western culture where one should speak their mind frankly. As you can see, Japanese culture is embedded into the very language itself. With all that said, this leaves me with several questions regarding languaculture and the English language.

Over the past century, English has become an international language that is spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of whom are not native speakers of English. As such, many English schools around the world are teaching English as a lingua franca. What’s interesting is that the students at these schools are learning English without delving into Western culture. Many of these students simply want to learn English in order to communicate in their own home countries, within their own cultural settings. When I thought about this, I thought to myself that this clashes with the concept of languaculture. How can they learn English, a language embedded with Western culture, without immersing themselves in Western culture? However, after some pondering, I realized that English is not just “one language” with “one culture”; there are many different dialects and variations of English, and each has its own culture associated with it. The English of India differs from the English of Canada, just as the English of Singapore differs from the English of the Australia. Just as the principal of languaculture dictates, each variation is in fact inseparable from each respective culture!

References

H. Brown, H. L. (2015). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education, Inc. .