Language in Context: How to Improve my English through Popular Culture?

Language and culture interconnect.  This may seem obvious, but the idea of culture as a vital factor when learning a language is relatively modern, recognition of its value arising only within the last few decades.  This agrees with the also relatively recent focus on the way the mind processes language, promoting a learning style that relies on context rather than rote memorization.

SEE ALSO: Some Funny Pronunciation Moments in TV and Film

Just as it’s easier to remember a historical event or a person’s name when put within their contexts – of a narrative for example – so does understanding the culture from which a language emerges boost your brain’s grasp of a new language.

How does the brain react to information about culture?

Essentially foreign language learning is learning about culture, because the structure of a foreign language forces the brain to think differently when it encounters expressions that relate to gender, spatiality and tense among other interpretive factors.

A popular contrast is made between languages of two genders (i.e., English) and those that include a third, neuter gender (i.e., Russian).

English generally reflects gender only in pronouns, while other Romance languages, such as Spanish, categorize nouns within gender categories.  Several studies were carried out recently and they have shown that these linguistic principles may yield distinct cognitive processes, reasonably affecting cultural expression of a non-native speaker.

Popular culture: Romance, Politics, Crime Scene Reports

However indirectly, this information validates studying the home culture of your target language.  Sociolinguistic focus does not have to be formal.  Observations within “low-brow” culture such as the level of directness between a romantic couple on a TV show, where Friends are an excellent example:

Of course, there is the formal language that is promoted through media and the idealistic voice such as the one used in the U.S.  President’s commencement speech:

On the other hand, a reporter’s passive and formulaic description of a crime scene can be equally valuable window into a culture and therefore a way of thinking, providing a more dynamic context for the English language.

Observing popular culture is a great way to analyze the values of current society overall, and historical studies provide even deeper roots into the evolution of a culture’s personality which is expressed through language.

Spatial Relations and Language Learning

Another dry and yet notable characteristic of language concerns the conceptualization of space.  A popular example is Australia’s aboriginal Pormpuraawans, who express spatial descriptions with cardinal directions such as North, South, East and West rather than above, below, right, left, etc.  A man may be to the southwest of a rock instead of in front and to the left of it for example.

While this could seem inconsequential to English learners, these peoples’ linguistic conceptualization of space has been proven by researchers to improve their general orientation, their sense of direction, demonstrating that language does affect cognitive function.

So, doesn’t it make sense that linguistic distinctions of space, time and causality affect cultural patterns, patterns that emerge from a group’s collective expressions and interpretations of the world around it?

If our goal is to learn U.S.  American English to communicate with optimal fluency, then no matter how knowledgeable we are about language principles learned from lectures and textbooks and no matter how successful we are in perfecting native-level pronunciation, failure to emerge ourselves in the target culture’s personality more easily creates communicative dissonance, validating the importance of sociolinguistics.

Optimal interaction, after all, means optimal communicative harmony, and this extends to more ambiguous culture-appropriate behavior.  

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