Language and Culture

I’m writing my first blog article to explain my views on the significance of cultural and communicative skills in language learning. Future articles will be all about the contents of featured films.

Language and Culture

Language is the key element and carrier of culture. In societies, culture is conveyed through language. Language incorporates the values of the society it belongs, its life style and traditions; in short everything that belongs to a culture. With this fact in mind, I believe cultural elements should not be ignored in teaching a language.

The needs and priorities of a student learning a language as well as the teacher’s teaching method and preferences can lead to different approaches; however experience taught me that students with a cultural awareness are able to learn the language by internalizing more.

Every teacher creates resources according to their needs. Considering that as a teacher teaching Turkish in Turkey, if I myself felt the need to create such resources, I’m guessing those who are learning and teaching Turkish abroad are in more need of similar resources.

Why communicative language? 

During the first years I started teaching Turkish, one of my students said, “People on the street are not using the Turkish you teach; for instance I’m saying ‘Nasılsın’ (How are you?)  to my Turkish friends, but they’re saying ‘N’aber?’ (What’s up?)”. When I thought about it, I felt that the student was right, because when he was interacting with his friends, he wanted to talk like them. After that class, I began incorporating more colloquial phrases and words into my lectures. Just teaching and illustrating various uses of the exclamation phrase – “ya!” in Turkish took me a whole lecture.

In conventional language teaching, first grammatical rules are taught and then students are expected to construct sentences that comply with these rules – which is perfectly normal. However an individual, who learns solely the grammatical structure of a language, realizes that, when interacting with native speakers, the language he or she learnt is in fact insufficient in communication, and this is frequently the case.

Of course grammatical structures should be learned; yet considering that the sole purpose of a language is “communication”, we can’t ignore the significance of acquiring communicative language skills in learning a language.

 

Ayşin Önder

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