What is "culture," and how is it related to language?

“Culture” is one of those words we use routinely without fully examining just what the word means. Morgan’s chapters 3 and 4 in Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice begin explaining the relationship between language and culture by first complicating the term “culture”. Morgan’s Chapter 3 explains how the five dimensions of culture – products, practices, persons, communities, and perspectives – are all interrelated. And, the image/metaphor of the iceberg (even though I saw a huge rock of a diamond – maybe that’s my culture of being female playing into my perspective?) serves the imagery purpose in also depicting the explicit and tacit characteristics of culture (predominantly of perspectives).

This discussion of explicit and implicit cultural characteristics helped to settle some anxiety I’ve felt with becoming a second language instructor. How do I know the relevant aspects of a student’s culture in order to effectively and sensitively make connections for that student in the classroom? Learning involves making connections between what one already knows and what one is learning. How do I know what my students already know if we have few aspects of culture in common? Morgan helped me understand (through Maureen McCarthy’s narrative) that I’m not expected to know fully my students’ culture; however, I am expected to understand the complexity of the concept of culture and that I need to find help/assistance from someone who DOES share similar cultural characteristics with my students, someone who understands those various products, practices, perspectives, communities, and persons. McCarthy explains how we are to arrive at this “emic” view when our “etic” views may not be accurately applied:

It is my opinion that in order to really get inside the emic view, an outsider needs an informant who is aware of the values and is able to articulate them, but is t is also possible to conduct research and draw from experience with he culture in order to make connections between products and practices, perspectives and values” (Morgan 30).

This idea, then, of finding an informant (whether that be a person or a text that informs), alleviates some of my anxiety regarding understanding how my students are cultured and how to best teach them.

In Chapter 4, Morgan discusses how language and culture are both inseparable (within the culture itself, one cannot separate cultural phenomenon from language) and necessarily separated (within the language classroom). Thus, the two concepts are interdependent. For example, Morgan explains that within the culture, language is ever-present and unable to be separated from the products, practices, persons, communities, and perspectives of culture. Morgan calls language “a window to the culture” (35).

Yet when studying language in the classroom, Morgan says we must separate the two, language from culture, in order to study the language. Morgan contends that language needs to be separated from culture in order to learn its linguistic features. In addition, the separation aids learning about the culture, as we need a language to use to talk about the culture. This, to me, makes sense; however, it is interesting to recall that often classroom pedagogy attempts to replicate the “real world”, to be authentic. After contending how language and culture are inseparable outside the classroom, it is a bit different to read of a proponent to separating the two inside the classroom.