The main intention of this essay is to relate how important language and culture are in education. For sure language and culture have to do with education, and the purpose is to say in what sense they affect education.
For some people the word culture involves “being informed”, “knowing about everything”, etc. At the same time, the way we act, the way we think and also how do we express ideas, that’s culture. Cultures are also groups of people that share similarities in terms of thoughts and ideas. That is the reason why we can find subcultures in a big culture, for instance if we talk about a country. If we see in Chile, people from Isla de Pascua would be a subculture, or maybe Mapuches, because they have differences with us in life styles, anyway they belong to the Chilean culture.
Language is somehow the medium or the way we can communicate ourselves establishing communication through messages. These messages can be represented orally, written and maybe by gestures. We can say though that language is whereby we express our thoughts, ideas, feelings, etc. Also it is a group of systems that follow a general rule, but it can be broken for differences among languages and their cultures, for example with Black English.
According to this we can say that language and culture are totally related, because language depends on the context that is represented. For example the word “cat” in other countries where people speak Spanish would be “gato” being differences in language. So, the environment will contribute in the language that we apply. The use of language, codes or symbols will be based on the people that as person we normally interact.
Knowing the way that we will understand language and culture we can start to develop this topic and try to find how culture and language affect education.
During this semester we read a lot of texts, and one of them really called my attention. The name of this text was language and culture by Claire Kramsch. He presented three main statements related to language and culture in his text.
One of Kramsch’s ideas was that “language expresses the cultural reality”. Our culture is characterized for established bad ideas. For example is typical that teachers think that there are “bad students” or “lazy students” instead of think that maybe teachers are doing something wrong in their. The point is that teachers have ideas that come from the scholar culture. The same happens with students and their parents, because they sometimes think that in schools are bad teachers which don’t want to work properly. Maybe this thought is because students in their homes listen to this from their families. In the case of teachers they make comments of their students in the classroom what is not good being gossiping about students. These two situations incite prejudice and create bad relationships among scholar characters.
Another statement was that “Language embodies cultural reality. In some ways we speak in the way people around us do it. People from the ghetto tend to speak differently and more informal and this is one thing we can find into the classroom. I have been in schools at social risk and they always speak informally and they don’t respect authorities at all. For instance they say “hueon” to the teacher without any respect and perhaps they are exposed to this at home, for that reason is normal for them to say it. So, the environment of the classroom becomes rude and aggressive without respect among characters.
Kramsch also postulated that “language symbolizes cultural reality”. I understood this like as persons we try to identify ourselves with groups that share similarities, for example African American people speak among them differently. When they say; what’s up Niggaz? To another African American group they will not be offended or feel they are being hurt for that, because that is one way they feel part of that group. If a white say the same to an African American he will get upset and it is an offense for them. If we try to bring these to schools is when teenager or children want to be good students but in their environment they have friend are not good studying, probably these “friends” will tell this guy that he is posh or dishonest with them because he wants to be better academically. The same happens with families in which the father doesn’t have a profession and the son or the daughter wants to study at university. Every normal father will feel proud of his son or daughter if he listen these, but there are some cases that the father feel is being humiliated because of this situation.
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