Lessons from Good Language Learners: Culture and good language learners

This chapter will discuss the role of culture and language learning in the classroom. Variations in cultural, ethnic, and national characteristics within and among individual students affect classroom dynamics and therefore influence the decisions which teachers need to make in order to provide an optimal learning environment for all learners. Culture is not an easy concept to define, and is especially difficult to disentangle from concepts such as ethnicity and nationality. Individuals define and interpret these terms differently depending on the sociocultural context they are situated in (Lantolf, 2000). There may be differences of the perceptions of self and others within a given sociocultural context (Finkbeiner, 2006; Kramsch, 1993, 1998), while surface phenomena (such as skin color) are often mistakenly related to categories such as ethnic, national, or cultural belonging. Very frequently these categories are outdated and neither reflect “current racial/ethnic realities” (Kramsch, 1998, p. 44) nor linguistic and cultural truths. In our globalizing world we cannot just glance at the surface and assume we understand others. We need to dive deep not only to understand others but also ourselves (Schmidt and Finkbeiner, 2006a, 2006b). Many different metaphors have been used to describe culture: for example, culture has been referred to as an iceberg, where only about one-seventh is visible, while the rest is under water and non-observable (Weaver, 1993).