Chapter 2- Culture and its Complexities: Kumar & Chapter 2 & 3- Language and Identity & Language and Culture Learning: Hall

Chapter 2- Culture and its Complexities: Kumar

Culture seems to possess an extraordinary power to sow the seeds of dissension between members of a family, between communities in a nation, and between nations in this world. The three cultural dimensions, archaic, residual, and the emergent, interact between old and the new in cultural patterns of individuals as well as communities. Here is where they dive into civilization and its interconnectedness that forge with one another. Culture and community presents a shared sense of individualized identity while society presents a general notion of institutionalized collectivity. Society gives a sense of belonging normally associated with the nation-state. I found this quote interesting because I can see it eventually happening when you are the outsider, aka non-native to the area, but when I lived in rural southwestern Arizona, I found it took at least 6 months for me to feel some how accommodated to the area since my ethnicity was the minority status along with beliefs, practices, and my native language is considered the foreign language. I dove into the “cultural capital” as they call it to become acquainted with a collective society. I didn’t feel as if I belonged to a cultural otherization.

The “definition” of culture seems to be a complex and contentious nature that’s vague, yet shapes the lives of individuals, communities, and nations alike. All the different varieties of culture have distinctive features that carries itself into the realm of hybrid culture. As cultural language goes hand in hand with individual development of learners cultural identity (interculturality), its challenges hold true to the everyday changes that becomes unequipped to the teacher. Language is a powerful tool that is the shaper of ideas and a guide for all thought. Hence how the internet and the many blogs that “run” our global informational highway can cause global upset from one spectrum to another. Language determines thought; the weak version suggests that language influences thought. Since the World War and the 1990’s the forces of globalization have been shaping the interests of all nations as a cultural capital. The impact it has had on all communities and nations, even technological, had allowed others to exchange cultural knowledge aside from political issues and general information. The difference between C (formal institutions) and c (daily life) and the standards: Communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities all tie together to help educators, sociologists, anthropologists, researchers, etc can help decipher and develop an awareness of other people’s world views, unique way of life, pattern of behavior, learned contributions, while offering contribution to solutions to common problems: ethnocentrism that dominates the thinking of young people.

Chapter 2 & 3- Language and Identity & Language and Culture Learning: Hall

Language is viewed as a universal nature of self-contained, independent entities, extractable from individual existence that eventually makes autonomous decision makers. Language users are social actors whose identities are multiple, varied and emergent from their everyday experiences- locally stimulated and at the same time historically constituted and thus are precarious, contradictory and in process constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we think or speak. Culture is assumed to be in individuals but not of them. They can display their cultural norms and realize their personal intentions that are not necessarily related to their culture group. People become socially constituted- a reflexive product of the social, historical and political contexts of an individual’s lived experiences. Individuals mediate their involvement and the involvement of the others in their practices. We take up a position in a social field in which all positions are moving and defined relative to one another: social action becomes a site of dialogue- authors of those moments. Culture is seen as a reflexive, made and remade in our language games, our lived experiences, and exist through routinized action that includes the material (and physical conditions) as well as the social actors’ experience in using their bodies while moving through a familiar space. We are not culture-free; we are every communicative encounter as we are at the same time carriers and agents of culture.

Lev Vygotsky is mentioned a lot throughout this chapter in his focus on being a cultural psychologist discussing sociocultural theory of development being first proposed over 50 years ago and while in more recent formations that have been built on has been modified and extended. ZPD (zone of proximal development) includes scaffolding, modeling, and training which assists different modes and to the role and relationships made available to us. Research development on language includes linguistic anthropology, developmental psychology, and psycholinguistics. Mediational means are the carriers of sociocultural patterns and knowledge where the tools and resources with which more expert members assist less competent participants in noticing, ordering, representing and remembering their involvement in their communicative activities: visual, physical,verbal, and computational. Linguistic applied approach views language learning as an innate process of linguistic system-building, a sociocultural perspective views as the jointly constructed process of transforming socially formed knowledge and skills into individual abilities. Socioculturally constructed process of changing patterns of participation in specific social practices within communities of practice. Language is considered both evolutionary and a historical process. To earn language, a sociocultural perspectice argues that what we actually learn is shaped by our history of lived experiences in our communicative environments and the particular opportunities provided to and created by us to use the means associated with these contexts: cultural learning. The processes and products of language learning, for it is in and through the processes of teaching, and more specifically the processes of approaching learners into the communicative activities of their learning environments where the conditions for and substance of learning are given shape.