Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Chapter 17
Language and Culture
GABRIELE KASPER and MAKOTO OMORI
Introduction
In many ways, the relationship between language and culture plays a
key role in education. Classrooms across the world are increasingly populated
by students and teachers of diverse language and cultural backgrounds
and can therefore be understood as contexts for intercultural
communication par excellence. On refl ection, this is not an entirely new
situation, considering that educational settings are meeting places for students
and teachers from different regions in a larger society, from different
social classes, with different religious and political affi liations, and of traditions
and interests that unite and separate people no matter how homogeneous
a society believes itself to be. So, instead of seeing the more visibly
multilingual and multicultural composition of today’s classrooms as an
altogether recent phenomenon, it is perhaps better viewed as reinforcing
and enriching an entrenched fact of institutional life. Looking at linguistic
and cultural diversity in this way raises the question of how language and
culture may be understood in relation to each other, and what implications
alternative views of this relationship may have for educational
practice.
Fundamentally, language and culture play two complementary roles in
educational processes. As all human activities are linguistically and culturally
mediated, language and culture enable and organize teaching and
learning. ‘Classroom cultures’ are constructed by the students and teachers
working together, ‘school cultures’ are the practices, big and small,
more or less functional, through which school life is conducted. Both are
shaped, among other factors, by educational policies, curricular priorities
and the material conditions of the school. Both are sustained through language
and discourse, talk and text, and through hybrid, multimedia forms
of communication. But just as language and culture furnish the means for
delivering education, they also serve as its object. The role of language
and culture as educational goals is most apparent in language teaching,
where language defi nes the subject matter. How culture fi gures in language
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