Free Essay About Diversity In English

Learning a foreign language can be a challenge especially for someone facing appropriacy and cultural issues. The objective of this paper is to examine the difficulties that learners of a foreign language encounter whenever they try to understand and correctly use a foreign word or phrase. The thesis statement of this paper suggests that it is difficult for learners of a foreign language to understand and use correctly the features of appropriacy; this is due to the fact that appropriacy is extremely complex as it is specific not only to a context but also to a culture. By reviewing evidences from literatures such as books and previously published studies about the process of learning a foreign language, the author of this paper aims to be able to prove the validity of this hypothesis.
In order to systematically answer the research question, one has to be able to define what appropriacy is. Appropriacy is one of the many characteristics of language. It is the extent to which something may be deemed suitable or acceptable. When applied to this case, this refers to the extent to which certain words and or phrases may be considered acceptable when spoken by a second language learner. Grammar determines the correctness of word usage in a sentence. It is often used as the sole basis of the correctness of an individual’s use of a language. However, grammatically correct does not always equate to being appropriate or acceptable.
Halliday (1985) discussed the Tenor-Social relationships between people. Tenor pertains to the overall quality of the people involved in a conversation or any form of interaction. It describes who they are, their nature, and statuses, among other socially significant relationships in which they are involved. According to him, the tenor directly affects the type of social relationships that exist between two or more people and as a consequence their conversation and use of language. There are 3 basic factors that are important within Tenor according to Halliday and they are agentive role, social role, and social distance. The agentive role pertains to institutional roles (e.g. doctor-patient, teacher-student relationships); social roles pertain to the power relationship between the agents, and the social distance pertains to the nature of the contract that exists between the agents (e.g. formal or informal).
Halliday (1983) also introduced two other concepts that make language learning difficult: field and mode. Field pertains to total event in which the text or phrase is functioning. It includes the subject matter or what is actually happening, including the purpose and motivation behind it, into the list of elements being considered when speaking or writing. Mode, on the other hand, pertains to the actual function of the text or phrase in the field or setting. Collectively, these three values make it hard to learn a foreign language.
Grice’s maxims of conservations namely the maxim of quality, quantity, relation, and number, also contribute to the difficulty of learning language. They complicate the otherwise simple process of sending a message to a receiver in a typical day to day conservation. The maxim of quantity can be observed when one tries to be simply informative, quality when one tries to be accurate and truthful, relation when one tries to be logical and relevant (stay close to the topic), and manner when one tries to be brief and clear.
Another maxim that may be included here would be the Leech’s politeness theory or maxims. This is similar to Grice’s maxims only that it is composed of six namely the Tact (minimization of expression of beliefs that imply cost to others), Generosity (minimization of expression of beliefs that imply self-benefit), Approbation (minimization of expression of beliefs that express dispraise of others), Modesty (minimization of expression of beliefs that imply expression of dispraise of self), Agreement (minimization of expression of beliefs that imply disagreement between one’s self and others), and Sympathy Maxim (minimization of antipathy between self and others). Together, these linguistic concepts make it very hard to effectively and consciously wield a foreign lanaguge.
An interesting case to look at here would be the way how certain cultural minorities in the United Kingdom use the British English language incorrectly but acceptably (i.e. deals with appropriacy). To specify, Nigerians use the language differently. One common observation that can be made from them would be their intentional misuse of the subject verb agreement that requires one to use plural verbs (e.g. are and were) for plural nouns in a sentence.
The phrase “you were”, as an example, is the grammatically correct way of saying or writing it. However, in the case of Nigerians, they tend to say “you was”, especially in day to day and colloquial means of conversation. Technically, the subject to verb agreement that is being taught to foreign language learners would suggest that that phrase was constructed incorrectly and may therefore be considered as an inappropriate use or selection of words.
However, if one is going to base the judgment of the phrase’s correctness on the cultural context of the person speaking or in this case, appropriacy, it may still be considered correct. After all, a lot of people from the Nigerian cultural minority are using it; and based on their perception, they are not violating any rules of the language’s use.
There are of course a lot of examples of how a grammatically incorrect phrase or word may still be considered appropriate from a native speaker’s point of view. However, it is important to note that the very presence of these gaps or loopholes in language usage, particularly these ones that are created by the concept of appropriacy, proves the research hypothesis set in the beginning of the paper right.
This also suggests that learning a foreign language is not an exact science. One mistake that learners of a second language make is that they tend to rely on grammar as a measure or basis of correctness of the language’s use too much. They tend to neglect the fact that language has cultural, political, psychosocial, and biological bases apart from the systems-based grammatical basis that they all focus too much on . As a consequence, they fail to value the political, cultural, and contextual aspects of the language.
Crystal (2003), in his book, suggested that the emergence of the English language as the global language is both caused by a favorable political and cultural turn of events. This finding from Crystal basically supports the fact that a language can be based on cultural and political contexts. The way how language is being used in the United States can be significantly different from the way how it is being used in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. This is basically the fact that gives validity to the concept of appropriacy and its ties to cultural contexts .
Resources such as Hunston & Oakey’s (2010) and Mullany & Stockwell’s (2010) books on Applied Linguistics and the use of English language (respectively) are all relevant in the process of learning a foreign language (or in this case, English). They offer concrete guides on how to achieve success as a foreign learner. However, what they do not offer is the ability for learners to consider the non-technical aspects of the language’s usage. In this case, experience would be the only reliable source of the knowhow needed for learners to be competent in using a foreign language with respect to all possible bases (appropriacy, cultural and ethnographic context, and even biology).
There is more to language than just being an exact science. The works of Brown & Yule (1983) and Fairclough (1995), both of which are discourse analysis, suggested that there are numerous structures and clues of social and cultural interaction that are discernable in conversations. There are things that speakers and receivers do in a conversation that reflect their culture, environment, and social practice. There are numerous ways how a sentence can be interpreted; in the case of discourse analyses, for example, they tend to analyze the meaning of a certain phrase beyond that phrase. This can be achieved by focusing on various tools used in discourse analysis such as observing turn-taking cues, discourse markers, framing strategies, and speech acts.
One relevant example here would be the discourse markers. These are the little words like “well”, “oh”, and “but”. These examples are typical in the United Kingdom. However, in other areas where English is also used as a language, they tend to use a different set of discourse markers and this basically verifies the fact that learning a foreign language is hard because of the appropriacy-related issues. The discourse markers that are used in other non-UK areas may not be acceptable in the UK.; however, they may be appropriate (the root word of appropriacy) in the areas where they are being used.
Harris (1982) also supported the research hypothesis in this paper. He opposed the idea that language is just a fixed verbal code that is designed to permit the transfer of ideas or thoughts from one person to another by dismissing it as a language myth. He, just like other authors whose works have been reviewed in this book, supported the notion that language can be based on a lot of contexts. This basically gives validity to the concept of appropriacy—which is then based on the concepts of cultural, social, psychological, and even biological contexts of language.
In conclusion, all evidences point to the validation of the research hypothesis that suggests that it is difficult for learners of a foreign language to understand and use correctly the features of appropriacy; this is due to the fact that appropriacy is extremely complex as it is specific not only to a context but also to a culture. Language is a complex collection of culture, social norms and practice, biology, and ethnicity; so complex that it would be erroneous to classify it as a fixed set of codes used to communicate.
Bibliography
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Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Boston.
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Halliday, M. 1985. Spoken and Written Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, R. 1981. The Language Myth. London: Duckworth.
Hunston, S., & Oakey, D. 2010. Introducing Applied Linguistics. New York: Routledge.
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