CULTURE AS CONTEXT FOR COMMUNICATION

Culture

F  A system of knowledge, belief, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that are acquired, shared, and used by members during daily living.

19th-Century Definition of Culture

F  Culture was commonly used as a synonym for Western Civilization.

F  Western cultures were considered superior.

Today’s Definition of Culture

F                 A community à to be self-sustaining.

F  A group’s thought, experiences, patterns of behavior, values and assumptions.

F                 A process of social transmission.

F                 Members who consciously identify themselves

BARRIERS TO INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

µ  Ethnographic and Cultural Approach

Noting every activity, observe, and evaluation. For example, if we want to know about Americans’ culture we have to live there for maybe some months or a year.

µ  The Cultural Approach

A cultural approach attempts to develop an ideal personification of the culture, and then that ideal is used to explain the actions of individuals in the culture. For example, it would be important to know that the Aboriginal people began arriving on the Australian continent 40,000 years before North and South America were inhabited and that it was not until 1788 that 11 ships carrying a cargo of human prisoners to begin a new British colony by taking control of the land.

The Study of Learners’ Language: Error Analysis

Lapses, mistakes and errors

Errors that are made by learners are linguistically different with errors that are made by a native speaker. Usually, the mistakes made by native speaker are changes of plan, where he starts an utterance, breaks off and starts another one with a different structure. For example:

It’s a bit—it’s hasn’t—I mean, I wouldn’t really care to have one just like that …

Native speaker may also make mistakes that are called “syntactic blends”. He may convert one structure into another without breaking off. Here is the example:

One wonders…why this country should support foreigners in our already overcrowded prisons…for the non payment of fines of which they had no opportunity to pay.

The redundant of appears to arise from a confusion of two constructions:

…no opportunity of paying

…no opportunity to pay

The third one is that “slips of the tongue” or “slips of the pen”. For example:

It didn’t bother me in the sleast…slightest

But those frunds…funds have been frozen

…of Peester Ustinov

Native speakers frequently make slips or false starts or confusions of structure. They are called lapses. Then the term error is to refer to those features of the learner’s utterances which differ from those of any native speaker. Lapses have no immediate relevance to the problem of language learning. It may not always be easy to distinguish between a learner’s errors and his/her lapses.

Contrastive Linguistic Studies

What the learner knows

Language teacher need to teach his/her student about what the student does not yet know of what s/he needs to know. Some students might have known about something that they need to know before they come to the class. Language teaching always starts when student/learner has already achieved his/her mother tongue because s/he will know about the formation rules or the code of his/her mother tongue. Of course it will help the student to learn L2 better. So, it is very important for students to understand their L1 first before they start to study L2.