Reflection Paper On English Language

ICESI UNIVERSITY
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
PROFESSOR: RAMÓN VERSAGE
JUAN DAVID CABALLERO

FINAL THOUGHT PIECE.
The aim of the present reflection paper is to analyze the importance and relevance of the course language and culture in our lives as language teachers, mentioning the main concepts that were of great importance for my cultural development, concepts such as, culture, language, identity and interculturality. The intention of this paper is to discuss what implies to learn a foreign language and mention how these concepts are interwoven into teaching English as a foreign language and why is important to include them in our English classes.
Teaching and learning of languages, linguistic identity, and language skills in the broad and complex

On this basis, for the English teacher, teaching will mean connecting his students with new cultural realities. We can speak about a “dynamic process of interaction” in which the students are allowed to develop their own interpretations from the establishments of reciprocal relations between the mother culture and that of the language they learn.
It is important to note that the classroom and the foreign language class is a socio-educational space that favors interactions and the mobilization of cultural knowledge. As Bruner (1997) states that the classroom is not only a place to learn certain things, to acquire the “toolbox” through culture, but to build one’s self-image.
Now as an educator, I begin to understand that by penetrating culture, the child not only takes something from culture, assimilates something, instills something from outside, but also the culture itself re-elaborates the child's natural behavior and remakes in a new way the whole course of development. It is pivotal to say that the value of one’s culture is not something that we come alone and that does not emerge in human being voluntarily and spontaneously, because it translates into a cluster of meanings that has been acquired as a fundamental purpose and value in everyday

Learning a foreign language is a continuous lesson of interculturality, it is the way to see the world, to approach it, to behave towards others, that’s what culture entails. In such an environment, we as teachers, should help anticipate, predict and defuse cultural interferences and let’s not forget that when we say “cultural interferences” we also mean mental and attitudinal interferences that intensify intercultural encounters. This means that, the language class can be a class in which the differences and similarities are reflected and studied in terms of beliefs, values, attitudes concerning the speakers of the other language-culture in order to learn about 'them' and about 'us', about their identities and our identities, including perspectives, valuations, ways of being,