Orientations Towards Language

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In this section of this chapter, I want to address some of the theoretical positions from which language is seen in relation to culture and how these theories have been reflected in language teaching. Looking at this relationship assumes that there is an intrinsic link between language and culture. This view of an automatic link between language and culture needs to be problematized, and I will do so at the end of this chapter. Indeed, this link is now almost commonly accepted in the theoretical literature on language and culture pedagogy, even if, in practice, certainly in the case of Dutch language teaching, the inclusion of culture in coursebooks is very haphazard, and the pedagogic activities frequently display a view of language as stable and autonomous.

I will first discuss this approach to language as being stable and autonomous. I discuss this here as part of a traditional approach to language learning, before looking at social and cultural views of language.