Tweetsmart: A pragmatic analysis of well-known native speaker Tweeters. (original) (raw)

Twitter in Foreign Language Classes

Handbook of Research on Learning Outcomes and Opportunities in the Digital Age

This chapter looks at the potential of the mircroblogging tool Twitter as a multifaceted resource for foreign language learners and educators. It highlights how this microblogging and social networking service provides authentic settings that are both dynamic and communicative, and which facilitate the cultural enrichment of first-year French learners, by enhancing their socio-pragmatic awareness and developing their multiliteracy skills in a second language. We argue for the importance of making students aware of this linguistic culture from an early stage of their language studies. This invisible second language culture is rarely discussed in traditional classrooms and only sporadically presented in foreign language textbooks; however, it can easily be experienced in digital environments like Twitter, making it an ideal context for such exposure. Our results suggest that the incorporation of linguistic cultural elements is indispensable to the development of intercultural communic...

Intercultural English and Cultural Context

Intercultural English and Cultural Context By Wayne K. Johnson, Dr. Jana Silver, and Craig Sower Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection. Ashley Montagu & Floyd Matson (p. ix) In an article about various aspects of culture and language playwright Roger Pulvers wrote, “The Japanese are wont, for one thing, to abbreviate a response, to encapsulate a variety of nuances in a single word or phrase. The most revered type of individual in this society would have to be the person of few words… very few words.” Pulvers went on to say that in Japanese language and culture, one value is clearly important: “Don’t say in 50 words what you can say in one” (2000, p. 21). This paper will provide more information about restrained expression and then explain a practical activity that helps students and business people understand one particular role that English plays in the world today. Using the context of personal experience in Japan, the paper will explore why students and business people produce passive conversations, and will investigate the relationship this type of verbal discourse has to various cultural and linguistic values in both native and target languages.

Language Use and Culture

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence

The intersection of language and culture is a crucial site for the study of social life; it is, moreover, a rich site for the study of intercultural communication, international relations, and cross-cultural studies of communication in general. Of special [p. 581 ↓ ] concern to interculturalists is the variety of ways in which language can be used, differences in the conceptions people hold about language itself, culturally distinctive vocabularies, culturally distinctive forms of expression, and the unique role of language as a means of communication in one setting or cultural scene relative to others. The latter concern brings into view other possible cultural means of communication, such as silence, nonverbal expressions, and nonhuman agents of communication, each of which can help place language use, generally, in its place within a culture's expressive system. Cultural analysts of language use explore these dynamics in multiple ways, including attention to culturally dense language, such as linguistic forms, which identify action, identity, emotion, social relationships, and dwelling.

Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication

2016

Most of us use language without giving much thought to the way it works or how it functions differently across cultures; however, the ability to use language is perhaps the most uniquely human of all our characteristics. Each of the forty-five readings in Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication acts as a window--a particular perspective--on language. Chosen for their accessibility, these classic and contemporary selections engage students in thinking about language and how it relates to many aspects of being human. *A broad range of topics and viewpoints provides the ideal introduction to the study of language and presents instructors with a variety of options for teaching from the text. *Introductions to each part, thematic unit, and reading offer succinct historical and intellectual context to guide students and help them make connections among the topics and articles. *Pre- and post-reading questions, suggested activities, lists of key terms, suggested fur...

What culture? Which culture? Cross-cultural factors in language learning Downloaded from

The burgeoning bibliography on cross-cultural matters in language of English teaching is a symptom of wider social, political, and technological developments and in particular the increased mobility of people, and therefore of contact between people, brought about by modern communications, electronic media, and international organizations. Thus, there is potential for greater harmony or greater conflict. There is also an increasing awareness of a common global destiny, highlighted by nuclear and environmental disasters of an alarming variety.

Culture in the Monolingual Classroom

Abstract Phatic expressions are primary means of establishing /maintaining social contact in human societies. Language and culture are its main ingredients transferred from generation to generation. Exposure to any new language involves learning culture awareness of the language learned. D’souza (1992) propounds and maintains that they are learned simultaneously (p. 16). Therefore learning a foreign language is learning about the culture of the language too, explicitly or implicitly. Kachru (1992) however points out another dimension to the “spread of English across cultures” maintaining it has “two sides”: those who use English as their first language and those who use it as additional language. To the majority of Indians and Bangladeshis English is the additional language, but in India, English is their second language whereas in Bangladesh its status is that of a foreign language.

The Cultures of English as a Lingua Franca

The cultural dimension of foreign and second language use and teaching has risen in prominence since the 1980s. More recently there has been much interest in and debate concerning the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). However, there has been little empirical investigation into what communication through ELF might mean for an understanding of the relationships between languages and cultures. This article reports on a qualitative study investigating seven users of English in a higher education setting in Thailand engaged in intercultural communication. Analysis of these examples of intercul-tural communication, together with the participants' metadiscussions of culture, revealed cultural frames of reference perceived of and made use of in a hybrid, mixed, and liminal manner, drawing on and moving between global, national, local, and individual orientations. Although the limited number of instances reported means that further research is needed to confidently make generalisations, it is suggested that cultural forms, practices, and frames of reference through ELF may be viewed not as a priori defined categories, but as adaptive and emergent resources which are negotiated and context dependent. Therefore, ELF needs to move beyond the traditionally conceived target language-target culture relationship to incorporate an awareness of dynamic hybrid cultures and the skills to successfully negotiate them. T he increased use of languages such as English for intercultural communication in lingua franca contexts brings up complex issues concerning any proposed relationships between language and culture. Given the multilingual and multicultural contexts of much ELF communication, any attempt to propose a straightforward language-culture-nation correlation must be seen as a gross oversimplification. Thus, a richer understanding is needed of the fluid and diverse relationships between languages and cultures. Just as advocates of English as a lingua franca

Invisible culture and cultural variation in language use: Why language educators should care

Linguagem & Ensino, 1998

In this essay I discuss theoretical and empirical evidence in order to characterize a relationship between culture and situated communicative behavior, especially in terms of the less obvious ways in which the conduct of talk-in-interaction is intrinsically connected to the participants' culturally learned ways of behaving. A brief intellectual history of key research traditions examining the connection between language and culture introduces the reader to the interactional sociolinguistic and microethnographic approaches to the question. Special attention is given to key concepts formulated by ethnographers of communication (ways of speaking, invisible culture, and communicative competence). These concepts have become instrumental for recent sociolinguistic research to be able to look for and describe — without necessarily having to address the mental states of participants— the apparently seamless connection between culture and language use in social interaction. Next a survey...

An Investigation of Foreign Language Learners

The present paper strives to highlight the relationship between language and culture in communication, in addition to the role religion may play in the activity for some nations, particularly Arab nations and Islam. It investigates specifically the strategies and problems of a sample of Algerian students of English at the University of Oum El Bouaghi while interacting with native speakers through social media.It focuses on the significance of cultural awareness in intercultural communication and attempts to shed light on the reasons behind students' communication breakdowns. The results show that despite the students' rather advanced level of English language proficiency, they still find problems in intercultural communication mainly due to cultural differences. Therefore, the integration of a course in crosscultural communication in language teaching curricula is highly recommended where research in the area should in no way be estranged from the pedagogical practice.