Week 7

I found the article, “The cultures of English as a lingua franca,” by Baker very interesting. Throughout the article, Baker stresses the importance of having a fluid and diverse relationships between languages and cultures. This goes along with the definition or lingua-cultures that was presented in the text. Lingua-cultures highlight the language–culture connection and the importance of different languages and cultures in communication. It is mentioned continuously throughout the article that English is not the property to one culture or community. It is used by over two billion people worldwide and can no longer be thought that those in the inner circle, particularly the United States, are the only people that speak it. The term English as a lingua franca, or ELF, is, ‘‘a way of referring to communication in English between speakers with different first languages,’’ (Seidlhofer, 2005, p. 339). Jenkins, along with Seidlhofer, extend the definition by saying that it, “involves communication in English between participants who have different ‘‘lingua-cultures, whether they are categorized as native speakers, second language users, or foreign language users. ELF can include code switching.

Krashen also gives two different terms to make a distinction between culture and languages so that she can describe her theory of why users of English as a second language think that language and culture can be separated. She describes what both generic sense and differential sense mean. Generic sense is the idea that both language and culture are intertwined, whereas Differential sense means that languages and cultures can be separated. I agree with her belief that all languages can take on new cultural meanings while being used (in practice). This term is known as langaucultures.  She goes on to say that,

‘‘the link between language and culture is created in every new communicative event’’ (p. 185). Therefore, a language such as English will have as many languacultures as there are speakers of the language, and in this sense there is no identifiable culture to which a language is inseparably tied. Yet, Risager adds a further qualification to this separation of language and culture. She believes that at the individual psychological level, that is, at the level of an individual’s linguistic resources or competence, language and culture are again inseparable and develop in tandem based on the individual’s life experiences,” (Baker 571).

I believe that languages and cultures are interlocked and work together when someone is using speaking in either their first or second language. When I speak in my second language, which is Spanish, I believe that I tend to steer my communication through what I know from my culture. My culture and furthermore, my way of thinking impact language. When I become a teacher, I have to remember that students are going to belong to many different discourses. I have to be aware of students that could possible speak with code alterations and even code switch. I think that it easy to do either of these two when forgetting how to say a meaning of a word, or phrase in your L2 because you go back and rely on your L1.