Language and Cultural Values: Six Ways to See It Clearer

摘要

The potential misunderstandings or communicative failures that occasionally arise in interactions between speakers whose primary languaculture is different may be due to cultural differences that go unnoticed. In this kind of situations, even more so when they are bound to recur, it will pay off for the speakers to familiarise themselves with the main cultural values in their speech partner’s languaculture – or at least for one of them to make an effort going in that direction. But this is easier said than done. How does one become familiar with something as intangible as a set of values? In this paper, we suggest a number of learning strategies for “foreign” values in a foreign classroom setting; the intelligent exploitation of selected resources that are part of the language taught, the analysis of certain communicative behaviours and the observation of carefully chosen salient features of a society provide language teachers with the means to equip their students with relevant cultural knowledge. Applied ethnolinguistics is the set of pathways allowing students who have reached a relatively advanced competency level in their chosen foreign language to gain a clearer understanding of the language-culture nexus and of the cultural values that tend to be associated with particular languacultures.