The Theoretical Context

In order to understand the complex and intermeshed relationship between language and culture, it is helpful to take perhaps a new perspective on foreign language and culture learning, namely looking at its dialogic nature, and recognising that language, communication and culture are all constructed through interaction (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984 & 1986; Vygotsky, 1962). In learning one's mother tongue and the cultural values of one's own country, development and socialisation takes place in stages: through the family, school and workplace (Doyé, 1992; Bourdieu, 1990; Kohlberg et al., 1983). Meanings and values are learnt concurrently with language (Bruner, 1974), with continual interaction and revision occurring. In the foreign-language classroom, the process is, of necessity, truncated with many important elements omitted, so that the language process is unlike that of mother-tongue learning although clearly many elements are shared (Bailly, 1995, 1998a, 1998b).

In this chapter we shall move from the broad focus of the relationship between language and culture to the much narrower focus of the foreign-language classroom, using the notion of dialogue as an informing construct.

The Dialectic of Language and Culture

The multi-stranded and highly interactive relationship between language and culture and the very different yet integrated character of these two elements would seem to justify substituting the term 'dialectic' for 'dialogic' in considering the very broadest dimension of this category.

Halliday and Bourdieu

'Dialectic' presumes a three-stage process: a statement (thesis), counter-statement (antithesis) and a bringing together of the two (synthesis). In the following quotation from Halliday, he suggests a dialectical relationship between text and context where the interaction between the two elements creates something that belongs to both: 'The relationship between text and context is a dialectical one; the text creates the context as much as the context creates the text ... part of the environment for any text is a set of previous texts that are taken for granted as shared among those taking part' (Halliday & Hasan, 1989: 47; see also Barton & Hamilton, 1998). We can apply this comment to our own context and substitute 'language' for 'text' and 'culture' for 'context'. We need to be aware of the problem of over-simplification and false distinctions. Kress and Hodge(1988: 73) warn us that 'every classification scheme is tidier than the reality it classifies', and the work by Lakoff (1987) on the unreliability of taxonomies or categories also gives similar warnings. However, it is possible to track significant features in the relationship between language and culture which can aid understanding and which point to how such understanding might be realised and promoted within a foreign-language classroom context.

It is useful also to consider Bourdieu's notion (1990: 131) of 'habitus', ways of thinking and understanding social reality, which he locates squarely in a cultural context: not only because these ways of thinking construct our understanding of culture, but also because these ways of thinking or constructs are themselves formed by that culture. In both cases, the operation reflects the social position in which it was constructed. In addition Bourdieu suggests that such constructs are not limited to personal and individual perception, but may also become a collective enterprise. He thus includes both a personal and a global frame.

If we take Halliday's and Bourdieu's comments together, we can see that both the cognitive structuring processes and the language that is produced relating to these schemata have an interactive, reciprocal relationship with the cultural context in which they occur. This very interaction is the core relation between language and culture. Language occurs always in a cultural context, and the values of that context will accrue to the lexical items as they are learnt (Vygotsky, 1981; Halliday & Hasan, 1989; Quasthoff, 1986; Goodwin & Duranti, 1992; Ochs, 1986; Voloshinov, 1973).

The referential/denotative relation of language and culture

Given, then, that language occurs within and forms part of a cultural context and that the lexical items and cognitive structures informing those items are all culturally bound, it is clear that in order to understand language we need to understand the culture that produced it and to which it refers. The denotative, referential aspect of language relies on an understanding of cultural norms (Widdowson, 1988; Rommetveit, 1988; Kress & Hodge, 1988).

One aspect of language emphasised by Rommetveit is important in the context of foreign language learners. He condemns the myth of literal meaning:

What is fundamentally wrong with the myth of literal meaning is ... a total incapacity to capture certain basic prerequisites for linguistically mediated intersubjectivity ... the dependency of linguistic meaning upon tacitly taken-for-granted background conditions and its embeddedness in communicative social interaction. (Rommetveit, 1988: 14–15)

The danger here for the foreign-language classroom is evident: the belief in literal meaning (reinforced of course by the existence of dictionaries and computerised translators) can lead to a superficial and sometimes misleading understanding, where the cultural context of the country and the context of the individual are ignored. There is no taken-for-granted one-to-one correspondence between languages. Each language operates a different discourse system, where lexical items often have different collocations or clusters of associated vocabulary. A foreign-language learner must migrate from one language system to another.

The culture that language refers to may not only be a macro level of collectively shared meanings (Geertz, 1973) but may operate on other levels. Schwerdtfeger (1993: 38) talks of her own language as 'abbreviations which encompass my very personal meanings of things', and children within a foreign-language classroom will need to be reminded of differing ideolects or personal versions of a language within a single language, giving form to idiosyncratic schemata and personal opinions.

It is important to remember as well that in the school classroom a particular kind of representational interaction is taking place. Wells in his research on children learning language, both before and during school, points to the key role performed by the teacher in 'using the power of language as a system of symbols to represent objects and events that are absent or no more than hypothetical possibilities' (Wells, 1986: 111; see also Bruner, 1974). Thus for learners, language refers not only to observable objects and actions, but to ideas and opinions that need to be deduced and imagined....