Foreign Language Acquisition: Communication and Cultural Insights

Posted on Jan 23, 2025 in Other civil servant exams

Unit 4: Valuation of Foreign Language Knowledge as a Means of Communication

Getting to Know a New Language and its Culture

Introduction

Language is the main means of human communication. Learning a foreign language is no longer a luxury in today’s international world. It also promotes mutual understanding, tolerance, and respect for the cultural values of others, as well as broadening the mind. This chapter will deal with the development of students’ positive attitudes towards a foreign language and its socio-cultural aspects.

The Value of a Foreign Language as a Means of Communication

Considering languages as a means of communication implies that the teacher informs students of the advantages of being fluent in a common language.

Why Learn Foreign Languages?

The foreign language should be promoted at school because of:

  • Social reasons: The incorporation of Spain into the European community generates a new communicative context and cultural exchange.
  • Educational reasons: The students’ communicative competence is improved by the acquisition of new linguistic codes, new concepts, strategies, abilities, and attitudes.
  • Cognitive reasons: Children can express their notions in their mother language but also in other languages, and this helps in the development of their cognitive capacity.
  • Linguistic reasons: The levels of auditory and phonological competence are greater in children; their oral understanding and pronunciation are better.
  • Affective reasons: Children’s spontaneity comes when learning a second language. But during adolescence, factors such as shame, shyness, fear, or being ridiculed come up. This can interfere with the learning of other languages.

English as a Lingua Franca

Nowadays, the language used as a lingua franca is English. Since the 19th century, English has progressively gained status as an international language. Several factors have contributed to it:

  • The quick growth of English native speakers in Great Britain and the USA.
  • The development of the English colonies in Canada, Africa, and Australia.
  • The political and military hegemony of the USA.
  • The great economic development of the USA as the first worldwide economic power.
  • The rapid development of means of communication in the USA and Great Britain.
  • The morphological and syntactic simplification of English is an advantage when learning it.

The importance nowadays of English as a lingua franca:

  • The UNESCO estimates that English is spoken in 60 countries.
  • More than 750 million people speak English.
  • English is the language of the most important world constitutions: UNO, UNESCO, FAO, NATO.
  • It is also the language of business.
  • The English language is used in literature, cinema, music, television, and radio, e.g., BBC.
  • From the Second World War onwards, English became the language of scientific and technological advances.
  • 80 percent of the information stored in computers is in English.
  • Millions of children study English in Primary Education.
  • The International Olympic Committee also uses English as a means of communication.
  • The number of Anglicisms in our language shows the hegemony of English in our society.

Advantages and Disadvantages of a Lingua Franca

Disadvantages:

  • The language suffers from linguistic variations because of the diverse cultural grounds.
  • For people who do not speak English, it is very difficult to communicate.

Advantages:

  • It facilitates international relationships.
  • It favors tolerance and respect towards a cultural identity different from one’s own.
  • Learning a language broadens the mind.
  • It increases self-confidence.
  • It contributes to placing value on the mother language.

Learning to Communicate in English

We will study how to help our students see the value of a foreign language as a means of communicating. The Communicative Approach is based on providing the student with enough communicative activities to develop oral and written skills to use the language with accuracy and appropriateness.

A. The Communicative Approach

It has been influenced by three linguistic theories:

  • Generative grammar (Chomsky)
  • Functional grammar (Michael Halliday)
  • Communicative Competence, described by Dell Hymes as what a speaker needs to know to be communicatively competent in a speech community.

Canale and Swain (1980) established four sub-competences:

  • Grammatical competence
  • Discursive competence
  • Sociolinguistic competence
  • Strategic competence

These four skills are complemented by socio-cultural competence.

B. Learning the Skills

To achieve that the language appears attractive to children, teachers should encourage pupils to develop several abilities:

  • Learning to listen: If teachers conduct the class in English, they will be improving the students’ listening ability.
  • Learning to speak: Methodological procedure: imitation of the linguistic forms, practice, and free production.
  • Learning to read and write: These skills help to understand how the language works, and they provide the students with the ability to work autonomously.
  • Learning to memorize: Students can learn poems, songs, or games. The teacher can provide visual aids as well as mnemonic techniques to help the pupils retain words and phrases.
  • Learning to discover: Creativity plays an essential role in children’s development. Children have the capacity to generate novel sentences, and teachers must encourage them to invent phrases to communicate their ideas and feelings.
  • Learning to think about language: Skills such as observing, comparing, and deducing help with the learners’ acquisition of the language and the development of communicative skills.

C. Communicative Activities

Communicative activities refer to tasks and exercises that students carry out for real communication. The Communicative Approach believes that the practice of communicative activities will produce an unconscious learning of the structures of the language. A communicative activity must be interactive, unpredictable, within a context, and authentic. There are two types of activities:

  1. Functional communication activities: Following directions, comparing pictures, completing information, solving problems.
  2. Social interaction activities: Role-play, dialogues, debates.

We can classify communicative activities into oral and written activities:

  • Oral: Consensus activities, following instructions, information gap, role-play, problem-solving, personal experiences, communicative games.
  • Written: Writing letters, completing application forms, looking for written information, and project work.

Linguistic Diversity: Getting to Know a New Language and Culture

Learning the Differences Between English and Spanish

Some key differences include the obligatory use of the subject in English, the use of auxiliaries to ask and to deny, a more rigid order of elements than in Spanish, the adjective placed before the noun, the lack of gender and plural in adjectives, the use of contractions, the omission of the article in generalizations and when naming games and sports, different spelling rules, and different punctuation signs. To avoid errors, the teacher should check that the structure has been practiced sufficiently and explain that they don’t have to translate word by word.

Socio-cultural Aspects of the English Language

The purpose of teaching language is to acquire communicative competence, and one of the sub-competences derived from this is socio-cultural competence. In Primary Education, the teacher will give information close to the children’s world so they become interested in the new culture. This knowledge can be classified into three parts:

  1. Social aspects:
    • Courtesy formulas (greetings)
    • Education (schools, uniforms, classrooms, schedules in Great Britain and America)
    • Food and drink (eating habits, English breakfast, eating hours)
    • Housing (people live in houses rather than in flats)
    • Money (dollars, euros, and pounds)
    • Names
  2. Cultural aspects:
    • Festivals
    • Music
    • Monuments (Big Ben, Statue of Liberty)
    • History (William Wallace, Queen Victoria, William Shakespeare)
    • Names of English TV programs (British BBC or American CNN channels)
    • Sports (football, golf, tennis, baseball)
  3. Geographical aspects:
    • Using maps, the children can locate the main English-speaking countries: Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia.
    • Main cities
    • British weather
    • Population (racial mixture)

Learning to Discover Another Culture

Activities: Songs and rhymes, projects, role-play, quizzes, celebration of traditional festivals, looking for information, stories, realia (English pen-club), and an English corner.

Socio-cultural materials: Visual aids (maps, flags, postcards), auditory (songs, dialogues), realia (tickets, money, magazines), and text (stories). All these materials will contribute to bringing the students closer to the Anglo-Saxon culture.

Conclusion

Learning a foreign language is a necessity in society, and it promotes international relationships. The development of positive attitudes towards the language and culture improves communicative competence and provides a wider vision of reality and greater tolerance.