The relevance of cultural linguistics to foreign language graduate education: From "language and culture" to "language as culture"

Abstract

This essay recounts the impact of the 2007 MLA Report on the development of a graduate course in linguistics. Blending anthropology’s traditional concern for the cultural context with cognitive linguistics’ emphasis on abstract models of knowledge, cultural linguistics provides an integrative framework for analyzing the intersection of language, culture and cognition. In particular, this essay demonstrates four pedagogical activities that help graduate students understand differences in “meaning, mentality, and worldview” between the L1 and the L2. It is argued that the application of cultural linguistics to foreign language courses is likely to foster greater “meta-cultural awareness” of language, that is, an understanding of how language is used to create meaning in cultural communities.