Complexity of community

Complexity of community

To answer this question, it is important to move away from the traditional one-culture-one language
model and consider instead a more complex picture of culture. A social-action model of culture shows us a creative dialogue between individuals and the structures of their societies. While different
societies and communities do have specific contexts and particular features that make us, our cultural
practices and our languages different, they do not necessarily prevent individuals from moving
creatively beyond their boundaries. Our daily manipulation of social rules, in our on-going struggle to
be ourselves and succeed in our agendas is something we share across nations and communities.
There is a broad and significant domain of underlying universal cultural processes which enables all of us to read and engage creatively with culture and language, wherever we find it. This is evidenced by the way in which we can read each other’s literature. One does not have to go to a foreign country or into a foreign language to find unfamiliar behavior and expression. We find this in the family next door; and young people face it every day as they engage with the diverse worlds of family, school,
classrooms, sports groups and so on. We can also make huge sense of other cultural realities if we open our minds to them.

There are several important implications here. Underlying universal cultural processes give language
learners the potential to apply the experience of how language and culture operate in their own
communities to new language. This enables them to stamp their own cultural identity on the language.

However, for them to be motivated to do this, the content with which they are presented has to be
sufficiently meaningful to resonate with and activate this experience. It is this authentic relationship,
between where they come from and new domains, which encourages language learners to be
cosmopolitan and to claim the world through new language experience.
It is hard to stop young people from learning creatively. This learning can, however, be inhibited or
diverted into less productive areas by powerful and popular ways of thinking about things in everyday life and within the ELT profession. These ways of thinking seduce us with the false, modernist certainty that relationships between language, culture and types of speakers are fixed, neat and measurable. For this reason, teachers everywhere, even in India, are still telling their students that the only correct forms of English are British or American and that to learn them they have somehow to leave behind the cultural realities of their communities. Our major task is to overturn these ways of thinking and move on to a new paradigm). Because these discourses have pushed the rich
contribution of students and their communities to the margins, it is from the margins that we must learn