IATEFL (SESSION 1)

MY PRIORITY FOR THE NEXT 50 YEARS: AN ONLINE CULTURAL DICTIONARY

DAVID CRYSTAL

He talked about the cultural perspective, intrinsic for English teaching learning process for over the past ten years. The perspective is along with the culture. The perspective culture has to be in the elementary of conversation. Conversation is very simple and basically full of culture context. Every culture is unique.

For the example: Dutch at daily routine

They (Dutch) say pragmatically different. In normal English we just say thank you and for something special we say thank you very much. In Dutch conversation they express the word thank. In the shopping conversation the costumer said thank you very much, so the shop keeper or lady shop answered please. The shop keeper didn’t say thank you for your coming. Dutch has many expression of thank.

English now has become global language and becomes different English based on the region. The different English makes new product. There are two ways of looking for the products; 1) involve international intelligibility, it is to express the variety of language because English standard of language or lingua franca; 2) focus on the only regional features which differences from one part to another part, for the example English-Australia, English-Dutch, English-India, English-Singapore, English-china, etc. Dutch-English and Chinese-English are relevant beyond traditional conception which is English comes with the Chinese culture ascent talk or English with the Dutch ascent talk. Both Dutch and Chinese have different feature ascent.

One of the consequences of the global spread of English has been a notable increase in the culture-specific content of everyday conversation among fluent L2 speakers. Despite excellent competence in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, communicative breakdowns often occur when speakers of different English varieties fail to grasp the meaning of an utterance that one of them has taken for granted. The distinctive of English lies on the lexicology and vocabulary. Those differences based on the context of culture. The different community is unique for other community from other country. When country adopts a language as local authority means of communication, it can be start to adopt in politic, religion, custom practice, sport, or many other.

The talk illustrates the kind of culture-specific items encountered, discusses the problems in current approaches, describes a fruitful taxonomy, and suggests how it might be implemented. Usual taxonomy already exists. Taxonomy is a classification of items. Special taxonomy is to adopt the learner’s need. Localities belong to the only one taxonomy. There are top ten level categories of taxonomy; such as Universe, earth science, environment, natural history, human body, mind, society, recreation, human geography, and human history. Each category has categories. If we break down the categories, we can see the power of classification. For the example: Mind, one of the categories is arts. Art is classified into the various characteristic, like ‘the music’. The music itself is divided into many subcategories. The subcategories can be essential of significant.

We use internet to develop an ELT cultural weapon. The much growing number of lexical cultural identity of the English around the world captured, correlated, and presented as a teaching result. Taxonomy is the kind of illustrated area. Using the internet, the lexical-cultural identities of emerging Englishes around the world could be captured, collated, and presented as a teaching resource.

The Relationship of the Conference Topic and Today’s Classroom

Different culture implies different language. To grain more knowledge and skill of competences, the second language learning is needed in the classroom. In the teaching learning process, the students should be taught the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and also culture. If we want to learn about language in some countries, we should learn the culture. In giving a task about linguistics, for the local culture you give a task about what the others mean. It is about pragmatics. For the intercultural, you give your student task about how they put the utterance or sentence in other language. 

The Ways of Speaker in Presenting the Material

In the way of delivering the ideas, he looks so enthusiasm. It makes the audiences pay more attention to him. He makes some stress in an important part to help the audience got the main idea. Although he can’t see the audience, he still uses gesture in his speech. He is drawing on the real-life example with such kinds of intonation and stress. It is so interesting when speaker discovers differences in cultural linguistics. After hearing his explanation, we can say that he organized well his speech and he has prepared the material very well. I thought that the audience understood well of his presentation. He also has a good ethic in delivering his speech, he said an apology and thank in his last part of speech.