Language is an extremely important instrument of human communication that men, as social creatures, use to communicate with each other (thru different means like signs, words, sounds and methods). The fact that sounds and images cannot be separated from a concept makes sounds and thoughts inseparable in a language.
Culture, in the other hand, includes not only a specific language but also common backgrounds like customs, traditions, and a way of life that a specific group or society share. Anthropologists define culture as ‘the whole way of life of a people or group'. In this context, culture includes all the social practices that bond a group of people together and distinguish them from others’ (Montgomery and Reid-Thomas, 1994: 5). Therefore, we can conclude that culture is not a relatively harmonious and stable pool of significations, but a confrontation between groups occupying different, sometimes opposing positions in the map of social relations’ (Fiske, 1989b: 58, cited in Kramsch, 1993: 24)
In this blog we will see why culture and the teaching of culture is such a vital competence for the language learner, for culture is like a mattress on which any foreign language lays down, and language learners must become familiarized with the cultural background of any language. This is one of the roles of the English teacher.
We will also touch briefly a few learning and cogninitive theories related with language.
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