INTRODUCTION Language is the main means of human communication, although, it also constitutes the main barrier. The fact that so many languages exist prevents people from understanding each other. We quickly notice this barrier when travelling. There have been many attempts at getting around this linguistic barrier: translating and interpreting, creating an artificial language and using an existing language as a lingua franca, which is the cas e of English. Learning a foreign language is, therefore, no longer a luxury i n today’s international world. If the citizens of a country are able to meet people from other countries on equal linguistic terms, this gives them strength and power. It also promotes mutual understanding, tolerance and respect for th e cultural values of others, as well as broadening the mind. This chapter will deal with the development of the students’ positive attitude towards a foreign language and its socio-cultural socio-cultural aspects. According to David Crystal (1987), “if a student perceives a country or cultur e cultur e to be unpleasant for whatever reason, the negative attitude is likely to influence language learning achievement”. We will begin by analyzing the reasons why children should learn a foreign language at school and by looking at the factors that have contributed to English being a lingua franca today. Then we will look at how teacher can encourage the students’ valuation of the foreign language as a tool of communication and the appreciati on of a culture different from their own. 1
THE LANGUAGE BARRIER
The discovery that language can be a barrier to communication is clearly made by anyone who travels to a foreign country, or, in some cases, within our own country. The lack of a common language is generall y seen as halting, or at least, impeding progress. There are several ways of getting around barrier formed by lack of knowledge of the foreign-language, but none has yet been entirely successful. The most important ones are:
Increase the number and availability of translating and interpreting services.
Develop an auxiliary language that everyone will understand.
Develop an existing language that everyone will understand.
Provide increased motivation and opportunity to learn foreign languages.
To many people the most obvious way of reducing some of the power of the language barrier is to promote the teaching and learning of languages in a variet y of child and educational settings. This seems t o be the most realistic way and so, organizations such as the Council of Europe have adopted recommendations to the governments of member states as to ensure, as far as possible, that all sections of their populations have access to effective means of acquiring certain knowledge of foreign languages. The study of the factors that govern success or failure in foreign language learning is today the largest domain of enquiry within applied linguistics. 1.1
WHY LEARN FOREIGN LANGAGES?
By the same token, some people may question the necessity of learning foreign languages. At this point, following David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclope dia of Language, I will argue will learning foreign languages is necessary. First, it can be claimed that th at foreign language learning is not a luxury in an international world. If a country is to exercise a role in world affairs, it really becomes a necessity. The path towards a united Europe rests upon our ability to understand each other, and it is obviously a strength to be able to meet people from other countries on equal linguistic terms. Learning a foreign language in Europe is a criterion of responsible international membership. Second, foreign language learning promotes understanding, tolerance, and respect for the cultural identity, rights, and values of others, whether abroad, or at home in minority groups. Language learning broadens our minds, because we encounter other ways of thinking about things.
Third, foreign language teaching has an essential role in preparing our pupils to cope with an everchanging environment. They may overcome their insecurity and develop their confidence as they face up to social and personal demands which are not usually encountered in a Spanish context. Fourth, success in international commerce is becoming more and more dependent on foreign language teaching. All grades and categories of personnel may profit from foreign language learning, not only the executive level. Finally, it may be adequate to say that learning a foreign language is the only way to fully appreciate your own language. 1.2
ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA
History demonstrates that there have been precedents in the idea of using a common language to communicate and exchange ideas. In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, Latin was the language which was used to present people’s ideas. From the 18 th century onwards, French was the language that was used in international diplomacy, and at the beginning of the 20 th century, German was the language in which scientists wrote. Nowadays, the absolute protagonism as a lingua franca in any field is English. Since the 19th century, English has progressively gained status as an international language. Several factors have contributed to it:
Demographic features. The quick growth of English native speakers during the 19 th century in Great Britain and the USA.
Political and military factors. Development of the English colonies during the 19th century in Canada, Africa and Australia. Political and military hegemony of the USA in the 20 th century.
Economic factors. Great economic development of the USA in the 20 th century, as the first worldwide economic power.
Technological factors. Rapid development f means of communication in the USA and Great Britain.
Linguistic factors. The degree of morphological and s yntactic simplification of English is an advantage when learning this language.
Nowadays, there is no doubt of the position of English as a lingua franca. Its importance is demonstrated in the following fields:
Geographical frame. English is spoken in more than 60 countries, and that it has a prominent place I a further 20. It is a dominant language or, at least, well-established in all five continents.
Number of speakers. More than 750 million people speak English; 400 million speak it as a mother language. If we include those who have a lower level, it exceeds 1 billion people.
Political field. English is the language of the most important world institutions: UNO, UNESCO, etc.
Economic field. It’s also the language of business, almost 50% of business is done in English.
Cultural and informative fields. English is widely used in literature, cinema, music, television and radio.
Scientific and technological fields. From the Second World War onwards, English became the language of scientific and technological advances.
Educational field. Millions of children in the world study English in Primary Education.
Sports field. The international Olympic Committee (IOC) also uses English as a means of communication.
Linguistic fields. The number of Anglicism in our language shows the hegemony of English in our society.
The facts speak for themselves: English has very few competitors today. In Europe, French is important because it is the official language, along with English in the Council of Europe. In the USA, Spanish is gaining more and more strength, due to the high number of Spanish-speaking people living there.
1.3
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF A LINGUA FRANCA
Ironically the main danger of a language used worldwide is the language itself. The fact that it is spoken in different parts of the world by people of such diverse cultural backgrounds makes the language suffer from linguistic variations. These variations can end up being unintelligible, as in the case of pidgin languages. Pidgin is a communication system that is developed among people that don’t share a common language, but who want to communicate in a language f or commercial or other reasons. It’s a language which is reduced in vocabulary and st ructures. They sometimes die, but if they survive they become Creole languages. Another problem with the use of a lingua franca is the disadvantages encountered by people who don’t speak that language. Of course, it will be very difficult for them to express themselves exactly the same as native does, but they would benefit enormously from speaking it. However, in spite of the problems that the existence of a common language presents, there are many reasons to favour it:
It facilitates international relationships at social, economic, cultural and political levels.
It favours tolerance and respect towards a cultural identity different from one’s own.
It increases self-confidence, especially in children, who are being prepared for future social or professional demands. It contributes to place value on the mother language.
As we can see, the advantages of learning an international language are many. Therefore, we can conclude b y saying that the teaching of a foreign language is an educational right to which all chil dren should have access, regardless of the real use they make of it in the future. 1.4
LEARNING TO COMMUNICATE IN ENGLISH
After seeing the importance of learning a world language such as English and the necessity of including it in the school curriculum, we will study how to help our st udents see the value of foreign languages as means of communicating. To realize the value of foreign language as communication, the learner should have the experience of communicating in that language. Since the 1970s, the belief that language is a means of communication has inspired a new approach in English language teaching: the Communicative Approach, based on providing the students with communicative activities that will develop their oral and written skills. Our current Educational System has incorporated this functional and communicative potential of language in its objectives and methodology. The ultimate goal is the development of the students’ communicative competence. The Communicative Approach also called Communicative Language Teaching and Functional Approach is one of the principles on which foreign language methodology is based on at the moment. This approach appeared in the 1970s as a reaction to the Audiolingual Method, which paid more attention to structure than to its function. The changes became a revolution in applied linguistics, that is, the teaching of a language. The person responsible for these changes was Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky rejected the structuralist approach to language description and the behaviourist ideas on language learning: “Language is not a habit structure. Ordinary linguistics behaviour characteristically involves innovation, formation of new sentences and patterns in accordance with rules of great abstractness and intricacy”. What struck Chomsky about language was its creativity. He proposed an alternative theory of language learning to that of behaviourism. Chomsky argued that sentences are not learned by imitation and repetition but are generated from the learners’ competence. Learners, then, should be encouraged to use their innate and creative abilities.
The linguists that pleaded for a new approach based their position on the theory that learning a language is not only the learning of structures, it implies much more. It is also necessary to learn how to use these structures by keeping in mind the moment, the place, the social conventions and the channel used. The work of these scholars had a significant impact on the development of a Communicative Approach to language teaching. The Council of Europe incorporated this communicative view into a set of specifications for a First Level Communicative Syllabus called Threshold Level English in the 1980s. These specifications have had a strong influence on the design of methods and textbooks in Europe. The main concept derived from communicative teaching is communicative competence, which is defined as what a speaker needs to know in order to be communicatively competent in a speech community, Hymes coined this term in contrast to Chomsky’s theory of competence. For Chomsky, competence simply implied the knowledge of the language system. Hymes maintained that Chomsky’s theory was incomplete and that a communicative and cultural dimension should be incorporated. A speaker does not only need the ability to use grammatical structures, but also to learn how to use those structures in a community (appropriateness). Canale and Swain (1980) were two linguists who expanded the previous description of Hymes’, establishing four dimensions of the communicative competence (subcompetences). 1. Grammatical competence. This refers to the correct use of the linguistic code, i.e. the mastery of grammatical structures, vocabulary and pronunciation. 2. Discursive competence. The ability to relate and combine grammatical forms, in order to achieve coherent texts. 3. Sociolinguistic competence. The ability to produce and understand messages relating to social context, participants and purpose; in other words, the appropriate use of language. 4. Strategic competence. It refers to participants’ verbal and non-verbal strategies: beginning, maintaining or finishing a chunk of communication, avoiding ruptures in the transmission of the message. These are the procedures which are necessary for communication to be effective. These four skills are complemented by socio-cultural competence, which implies the knowledge of certain cultural facts which are of key importance for us to understand a message completely. Communicative activities refer to tasks and exercises that the student carries out for real communication. These activities focus more on the message than on the linguistic features of language. Children learn how to speak without knowing anything about verbs, adjectives or verbal tenses. The Communicative Approach believes that the practice of communicative activities will produce an unconscious learning of the structures of the language. A communicative activity must be:
Interactive. Two or more people are involved in the communicative interaction.
Unpredictable. A student has to seek the information his/her partner has. This will create the necessi ty and the desire to communicate.
Within a context. This refers to the situational context (place, channel) as well as to the linguistic context (cohesion in linguistic forms and vocabulary).
Authentic. The language used should be genuine, that is to say, similar to an English-speaking person’s.
Developed within a relaxed atmosphere. If the student is under normal emotional conditions, the learning will be more effective.
Examples of oral communicative activities: information-gap acti vities, role-play, problem-solving, following instructions, describing personal experiences, communicative games and re aching a consensus. Examples of written communicative activities: writing instructions, writing short messages, writing short letters, writing to penfriends, writing questionnaires, writing imaginary diaries, filling in forms, communicative games and project work.
2
LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY: GETTING TO KNOW A NEW LANGUAGE AND ITS CULTURE
Through a foreign language, students perceive that there are other ways of understanding and other ways of life. The language teacher has to make students aware of this linguistic and socio-cultural diversity. 2.1
THE HISTORY OF CULTURE TEACHING
With regard to the history of culture in teaching and on the assumption that communication is not only an exchange of information but also a highly cognitive as well as affective and value-laden activity, Melde (1987) holds that foreign language teaching should foster ‘critical awareness’ of social life. The role of cultural learning in the foreign language classroom has been the concern of many teachers and scholars and has sparked considerable controversy, yet its validity as an equal complement to language learning has often been overlooked or even impugned. Up to now, two main perspectives have influenced the teaching of cultur e. One pertains to the transmission of factual, cultural information, which consists in statistical i nformation, that is, institutional structures and other aspects of the target civilization, highbrow information (Kramsch, 1993). The other perspecti ve, drawing upon cross-cultural psychology or anthropology, has been to embed culture within an interpretive framework and establish connections, namely, points of reference or departure, between one’s own and the target country. This approach, however, has certain limitations, since it can only furnish learners with cultural knowledge, while leaving them to their own devices to integrate that knowledge with the assumptions, beliefs, and mindsets already obtaining in their society. From all the above, it is evident that, much as the element of culture has gained momentum in foreign language learning, most educators have seen it as yet another skill at the disposal of those who aspire to become conversant with the history of life of the target community rather than as an integral part of communicative competence and intercultural awareness at which every “educated individual” should aim. 2.2
TEACHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Now my concern turns to answer what culture is and argue why culture should be taught. To begin with, language is a social institution, both shaping and shaped by society at large. Amongst those who have dilated upon the affinity between language and culture, it is Duranti who succinctly encapsulates how these two interpenetrate: to be part of a culture means to share the propositional knowledge and the rules of inference necessary to understand whether certain prepositions are true. To the propositional knowledge, one might add the procedural knowledge to carry out tasks such as cooking, weaving, farming, fishing, giving a formal speech, answering the phone, asking for a favour (Duranti, 1997). Therefore, culture and communication are inseparable because culture not only dictates who talks to whom, about what, and how the communication proceeds, it also helps to determine how people encode messages, the meanings they have for messages, and the conditions and circumstances under which various messages may or may not be sent, noticed, or interpreted…Culture…is the foundation of communication. The question arises, however, that if language and culture are so intricatel y intertwined, why should we overtly focus on culture when there are other aspects of the curriculum that need more attention? To begin with, we should concern ourselves with culture because, even though it is inherent in what we teach, to believe that whoever is learning the foreign language is also learning the cultural knowledge and skills required to be a competent L2/FL speaker ’denies the complexity of culture, language learning, and communication’ (Lessar Clouston, 1997). Second, it is deemed important to include culture in the foreign language curriculum because it helps avoid the stereotypes that Nemmi (1992) has discussed and the present study has intimated. The third reason for expressly teaching culture in the foreign language classroom is to enable students to take control of their own learning as well as to achieve autonomy by evaluating and questioning the wider context within which the learning of the target language is embedded. Tomalin & Stempleski (1993), modifying Seelye’s (1988) ‘seven goals of cultural instruction’, may provide an answer pertinent to t he question posed.
According to them, the teaching of culture has the following goals and is of and in itself a means of accomplishing them: 1. To help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people exhibit culturally-conditioned behaviours. 2. To help students to develop an understanding that social variables such as age, sex, social class, and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave. 3. To help students to become more aware of conventional behaviour in common situations i n the target culture. 4. To help students to increase their awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in the target language. 5. To help students to develop the ability to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture, in terms of supporting evidence. 6. To help students to develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture. 7. To stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people. 2.3
DEVELOPING CULTURAL AWARENESS
It is clear that the development of cultural awareness, though beginning in the classrooms is a far-reaching process. To facilitate it we should give our pupils regular opportunities to: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
2.4
Come into contact with native speakers in this country Work with authentic materials from the countries of the target language Consider and discuss the similarities and differences between our pupils’ culture and English cu lture. Identify with the experiences and perspective of English people Learn the appropriate social conventions Cultural problem solving is yet another way to provide cultural information Alongside linguistic knowledge, students should also familiarize themselves with various forms of non-verbal communication, such as gesture and facial expressions, typical i n the target culture. LEARNING THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGLISH AND SPANISH
Languages are different not only because they have different words, but also because the system is different. Students usually think that the language they are learning has the same rules as their mother language. This facts leads them to make L1 interference error, that is to say, they apply a Spanish pattern to English. The English teacher should draw the students’ attention towards these differences, tell them that languages are different and that they should not be surprised by that fact. The most significant differences between the two languages are: 1. Obligatory use of the subject in English, since it lacks enough verbal inflections to distinguish the grammatical person. 2. Use of auxiliaries to ask, to deny, etc. 3. A more rigid order of elements than in Spanish. 4. The adjective is placed before the noun; it also lacks gender and plural. 5. Use of contractions. 6. Omission of the article in generalizations, as well as in naming games and sports. 7. Different spelling rules. 8. Different punctuation signs.
2.5
SOCIO-CULTURAL ASPECTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
The purpose of teaching languages is for the student to acquire communicative competence, and one of the subcompetences derived from this is socio-cultural competence. The student should be aware of the cultural background of that language in order to communicate appropriately. Therefore, part of the teacher’s work consists of introducing relevant knowledge of that country. In Primary Education, the teacher will give information which is close to the children’s world, so that they become interested in the new culture. This knowledge can be classified in three parts:
Social aspects. o Courtesy formulas and their use in each situation. Education. o Food and drink. o o Housing. o Money. o Names.
Cultural aspects. o Festivals. Music. o o Monuments. o History. o Names of English TV programmes Sport. o
Geographical aspects. Main English-speaking countries. o o Main cities. o British weather. o Population.
2.6
LEARNING TO DISCOVER ANOTHER CULTURE
Having analyzed some of the socio-cultural aspects that can be introduced in Primary Education, we will now have a look at types of activities and materials we can use:
Activities: songs and rhymes, projects, role-play, quizzes, celebration of traditional festivals in class.
Socio-cultural materials: visual aids, auditory aids, realia and text.
CONCLUSION Learning a foreign language is a necessity in a society that tends to remove language barriers and promotes international relationships at social, cultural, professional and political levels. The learning of a language implies the learning of socio-cultural aspects of that language. The development of positive attitudes towards the language and culture that the students are learning will not only improve their communicative competence, it will also provide them with a wider vision of reality and greater tolerance.
