Language Culture and Curriculum
Editor and Book Reviews Editor: Eoghan Mac Aogain (St Patrick's College)
|
Volume: 15 Number: 3 Page: 210–223
|
|
|
|
|
Carrying a Baby in the Back: Teaching with an Awareness of the Cultural Construction of Language
|
|
Randal Holme
|
|
In the communicative era, language teachers tend to focus on 'culture' according to a combination of five views: the communicative view, the classical curriculum view, the instrumental or culture-free-language
view, the deconstructionist view, and the competence view. The first three views treat cultural content as marginal or even irrelevant to successful language learning. The last two views treat language
and culture as being acquired in dynamic interaction, with one being essential to the full understanding of the other. They assume that language and culture actually shape and interpenetrate each other
in accordance with Whorf's (1956) relativistic studies of language and meaning. This assumption was once questionable but Whorf's conclusion is now supported by the cognitivist interest in how the conceptual
structures that underlie abstract and, hence, grammatical meaning may be culturally constructed (e.g. Gibbs, 1994; Heine, 1997; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).
© Multilingual Matters 2002
Full text PDF
|
