Language and culture

Abstract

The study of culture plays a very important role when it comes to teaching or learning a foreign language since words and phrases of that language, such as English, refer to internal meanings to its culture, creating a reality and a well-defined semantic relationship that the learner must understand.

Language and culture have at least three important components:

1) Language learning offers learners the opportunity to understand the relationship between language and other cultural phenomena.

2) Language learning allows a comparison between the foreign language and the mother tongue and highlights similarities as well as differences between the two.

3) The learning of the foreign culture passes by the knowledge of one’s own culture and takes into account its linguistic dimensions.

In this work, we will try to show that these three components are complementary and interdependent, and must evolve in parallel in the overall educational process. The objectives should be clear so as to make learners appreciate the similarities and differences between their own culture and the communities where the target language is spoken. This will, therefore, help them identify with the experience and the perspective of native speakers of that language, and then use this skill to develop a more objective view of their own culture and their way of thinking.