THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT IN TEACHING SECOND OR FOREIGN LANGUAGES.

By Piedad Isabel Garrido Ruiz

1.ABSTRACT:

This paper draws the important role that society plays in  the development of the individual sharing the same context in order to teach  foreign or second languages. I am studying the conception of Halloween, one of the typical British and North American celebrations  in two groups of Spanish learners in a language centre. It describes an empirical study which sets out to describe and compare one group with  knowledge of  this celebration and the other group without it. The findings of the comparative analysis can be used to promote the Context of Culture and the Context of Situation in the instruction of our students. It is very important that they construct  their knowledge collaboratively with others in the same social context in order to carry on the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of the language.

 

2.INTRODUCTION:

In this study the main focus is the importance of the context’s role in the classes, concretely, in the classes of Spanish language students in a language centre of Calpe (Alicante).

The study groups are two groups of children learning Spanish. One group is composed by two English girls who are eight and twelve years old and, have a fluent conversational and written Spanish level. In the second group, there are also two students with the same level as the first group, however, they are two German brothers who are eight and eleven years old.

These children attend one hour classes twice a week delivered by a native Spanish speaking secondary English teacher, me, giving the classes in Spanish . The lectures they attend could be classified as interactive classes where the oral participation of the students is very high in the both groups.  However, this oral participation was interrupted in one group, in the group of  the German brothers in one hour session by the presentation of a topic: Halloween.

 

3.DESCRIPTIVE STUDY:

I decided to prepare a class involving the topic of Halloween as an  excuse to practise descriptions, the past simple and the future. My intention was to start telling them that ‘Halloween’ was near and although it was not  a traditional celebration in Spain we were starting to celebrate it because of the British and the USA influence. Afterwards, my idea was to show them a picture with the dinner of a family of vampires on it where we can also see a cat flying on a broom, one monster’s eyes, the face of a monster and in a small sketch there is a girl on bed saying: ¡Qué pesadilla!

Firstly, I wanted them to describe the picture, tell all the monster they knew, which one they considered bad and good, if they have seen cartoons or movies of monsters, vampires, etc., if they are real or fiction and if these creatures cause them nightmares. Secondly, I wanted them to tell me if they had ever celebrated Halloween in their native countries (the answer being affirmative, they had to tell me what disguise they wore, what they did) and  if they were going to celebrate it in Spain (the answer being affirmative, they had to tell me what disguise were they thinking about wearing and what they will do). Finally, I wanted them to write about their favourite creature.

 

3.1.Results of the comparison of the two groups of children:

With the two English girls I reached my aims, that is to say, they were able to describe the picture, they told about  their ways of celebrating Halloween in their country,  their disguise, house decoration, what they would do this year in Calpe, etc. However, with the two German brothers the completely opposite situation happened. They were not even able to describe the picture. Therefore, I thought that maybe they did not know how to say ‘monstruo’, ‘vampiro’,  ‘bruja’, etc., Consequently, I started to look for those words in a Spanish-German dictionary. That is to say, I just thought about that they could not describe the picture because they had not  enough vocabulary to do it. I supposed  they knew the signified (concept that is constructed in the receiver’s mind) but that they did not know the signifier (the sound image) (Alcaraz, E., 1990: 78).  I was not right about what I supposed because once the words were located and I read them and they also read them, they still remained without knowing what I wanted to talk that day in the class.

According to Alcaraz, E., they did not know the substance of the signified which is presented as the global mass of thoughts, sensations and emotions common to the whole community independent of the languages they spoke (Alcaraz, E., 1990: 78).

 

 

 

 

 

For example:

Mental image (SIGNIFIER)	Sound image (SIGNIFIED)
	/bruja/ /bruixa/ /witch/ /hexe/

 

Such a situation surprised me a lot because all the children I knew like to know things about monsters, vampires, witches. However, these two brothers did not have the referents about witches, monsters, vampires, etc., which is due to the conventions created by the tradition and the use.   I, therefore, had to change the direction of the class because what I had prepared  did not  take me  anywhere.

I was not sure enough  if the children were joking or they really did not know anything about Halloween.  Then, when their father collected them I told him about what had happened and he asked me please not to talk about this kind of topics with his sons.

It was surprising  these children did not know anything about Halloween when with the television, with the contact with other children these kinds of topics are known earlier or latter. However, when I commented the occurred to the head of the academy, she told me that  this was not the case of these children. These children do not go to  school because their mother teach them at home and they have no friends of the same age. One day after all this happened I asked them what they used to watch on television and they told me that they did not  watch TV.

What I am driving at, with all explained above is  the importance of  society in the development of the individual and of sharing  the same context.

What happened to me with these children can be related to the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who had problems of how to interpret and expound his ideas about the culture of a group of islands of the South Pacific to English-speaking readers and had to provide an extended commentary to place the text in its living environment and, in an article written in 1923, he coined the term ‘context of situation’. But, he also said that it was necessary to give more than the immediate environment.  He saw that in any adequate description, it was necessary to provide information not only about what was happening at the time but also the total cultural background, that is, the whole cultural history behind the participants.  All these played a part in the interpretation of meaning.  Then, Malinowski also introduced the ‘ context of culture’ (Halliday, M.A.K. & R. Hasan 1989²: 3-14).

Firth and Dell Hyme also contributed to the theory of the Context of Situation. On one hand, Firth described it with the following headings: participants in situation, the action of the participants, other relevant features of the situation and the effects of the verbal action. On the other hand, Dell Hymes identified: the form and content of the message, the setting, the participants, the intent and effect of the communication, the key, the medium, the genre and norms of interaction (Halliday, M.A.K. & R. Hasan 1989²: 3-14).

I could suppose that the picture implied different meanings between  one student and another because they are from different countries, because they can have different ways of celebrating Halloween, of decorating the house, because they are boys and girls, etc. For example, girls can be afraid of these creatures, however, boys, although they are,  they usually  say they are not and  they also can have different conceptions of  those monster which are bad or good. However, what I never could imagine was that the picture did not imply anything for the German brothers, that  Halloween was something totally unknown: what children, nowadays do not know who are the wolf-man, Dracula. etc.? I just did not take into account that they had  not the necessary context to interpret the picture and what is unknown has no meaning without a context to be able to interpret it.

 

According to David Butt, a text’s length is not important and it can be either spoken or written.  What is important is that a text is a harmonious collection of meaning appropriate to its context. Actually, a text always occurs in two contexts, one within the other. The outer context around a text is known as the context of culture. Within the context of culture, speakers  and writers use language in many more specific contexts or situations.  Each of these is an inner context, which functional linguists call the context of situation (Butt, D. et al. 2000²: 1-44).

In the context of situation we can distinguish three aspects; field (what is to be talked or written about), tenor (the relationship between the speaker and hearer) and, mode (the kind of text that is being made).  These three parameters of context of situation affect our language choices precisely because they reflect the three main functions of language (Halliday, M.A.K. & R. Hasan 1989²:24-28).

Language seems to have evolved for three major purposes:

1. To talk about what is happening, what will happen, and what has happened called ideational metafunction which uses language to represent experience (Butt, D. et al. 2000²: 45-84).
2. To interact and/ or to express a point of view called interpersonal metafunction which uses language to encode interaction (Butt, D. et al. 2000²: 85-132).
3. To turn the output of the previous functions into a coherent whole called textual metafunction which uses language to organise our experiential, logical and interpersonal meanings into a coherent written or spoken text (Butt, D. et al. 2000²: 133-158).

 

The two girls had knowledge about  the concept of Halloween, however, the two boys were no able to understand its meaning because they did not have this human experience. What I want to say is that ‘our mind builds up pictures of reality  from the landscape of our human experience’ although ‘each speaker represents their experience differently by packaging it in different ways but if you have not experience about something you can not transmit anything about it’ (Butt, D. et al. 2000²: 46).

Speakers do more than talk about experience: they also use language to interact with language and to express interpersonal meanings. In this way, when I  asked the girls for information about Halloween, they (as students) gave me (as a teacher) the information I asked them. However, this exchange would not have been possible with the two brothers, they could no talk about  something that they had no experienced. The girls were able to organise an oral text during the speaking time and to write about their favourite creature in a coherent whole. This metafunction, like the two others would have been impossible to carry out with the boys because the communication was broken up from the beginning. I mean, they could not create any oral and written text because they did not share the context[1] I presented them.

 

 

 

 

 

ENGLISH GIRLS	GERMAN BOYS
They had human experience about Halloween.	They hadn’t human experience about Halloween.
I received the information I asked them for	Broken Communication
Organisation of an ORAL & WRITTEN text	Broken Communication

 

 

4.CONCLUSION:

In this small scale study of the differences in one Spanish learners group who could give meaning to Halloween and in an other who did not, an attempt has been made to determine the importance of  society and of  context  in second or foreign languages teaching.

I have  compared the development and the result of the activities I had prepared about Halloween in the two groups of students. Once I had reached the first obstacle  with one of the groups  in order to carry out the activities I  thought it was a question of signified and signifier in order to resolve it. However, I was not able to solve it and  contrasted the problem with the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. After this contrast I could locate what was happening with one of the groups talking in this way about context of culture and context of situation and, the contributions of Firth and Dell Hymes. In the context of situation I have distinguished: field, tenor and mode which affect our language choice reflecting the three main functions of language: ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction in order to explain the evolution of the activities about Halloween in both groups.

Malinowski providing a rather extended commentary to his work, the English-speaking readers understood the concrete situation that he wanted to transmit them.  Therefore, from my point of view these children would understand the meaning of Halloween and the whole environment surrounding it with the necessary explanations. As Vigotsky says ‘we construct knowledge collaboratively with others in the same social context (Butt, D. et al., 2000 : 259). We can say that  the stages of the development are not universal but keep relation with the socio-cultural context, and concretely, with the kind of  instruction or teaching received (González Nieto, L , 2001: 106). However, their parents did not want their children to share the social context of the rest of children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5.APPENDIX:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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