Importance of the course Language and Cluture

In a big picture, I think every student of Bachelor in English as a Foreign Language should take the course Language and Culture in UNAD. I will tell you some of my personal reasons to take this course that you can appreciate how valuable it is for us like future teachers.

My first motivation to take this course was to know better the relationship of language and culture and how important is the multicultural communicative competence. So, I had the need to know and understand how inseparable is the language from the culture in which this is produced and spoken. I also wanted to know more about United States culture as an anglophone country that was and still nowadays is influence by many other cultures.

I think it is essential to know from where the features of the language spoken or written come. This course really helped me to understand how each language and culture is influenced by others and this do not stand alone like in isolation. There have been intercultural exchanges from the beginning of humanity times. Humankind was always moving around and traveling, this nomadic way of living is what gave us in the present reach ancient cultures and traditions.

Taken from AZ Quotes

On the other hand, nowadays this process of the cultures going and coming is still happening, under the name of immigration movements. I want to give as an example the American culture again. The first indigenous population of the United States gave origin to many of the oral traditions still present in this huge country from myths that talk about the creation of the world to tales about the love between humans and animals. These oral traditions later on time were influenced by the first European settlers and in the same way by African slaves. They took some of the indigenous believes and oral traditions to shape their own oral tradition.

In summary, the richness of the language and culture of the anglophone countries should be learnt by learners of English as a foreign or second language because this will help them to understand better and give not only a literal interpretation to the language and culture. This understanding of other language and culture can help them to shape better relationships with native speakers of English and achieve a more natural way to speak and express themselves in that other culture that at the beginning could be very unknown. However, in the same way this can help learners to communicate their own culture to those who are foreigners to their native language and culture. Hence, the benefits of the course Language and Culture can be multiple and can transcend the own culture and a foreign culture.