Culture has been defined as ‘the total set of beliefs, attitudes, customs, behavior and social habits of the members of a particular society’. Our culture informs us what is appropriate, what is normal, what is acceptable when dealing with other members of our society. Our culture lets us know what to expect from others, what they will say in certain situations, and how they will say it. It lets us know how they will act and how they will react. It is the wisdom of the ages handed down to the present. We are affected by it, and it is affected by us. Culture is in a constant state of flux, gradually changing, changing the way we talk and think, the way we act, and the way we react.
That culture is indelibly linked to language is undeniable, since language is a vehicle through which it is transmitted, probably its main vehicle. One observable way in which language acts as a vehicle or transmitter of culture is in the use of idiomatic language. Idioticity is possibly the most common form of language, in terms of percentages of the total. Idiomatic language, most often found in the form of sentences consisting of more than one word, often does not conform to the grammatical structure of non-idiomatic language. For example, in the phrase, ‘at large’, as used in the expression, ‘the general public’, or in the sentence, ‘The escaped convicts were at large for two weeks before being recaptured’, the preposition ‘ in ‘ it appears before what appears to be an adjective, ‘big’. This seems to be in direct contradiction to the ‘normal’ place that such a part of speech occupies in a grammatically correct sentence, viz. before a noun, as in the following examples, ‘at home’, ‘at work’, ‘at the office’ et al. The phrase, ‘generally’ appearing on the page in isolation from any context that would make its meaning more transparent, has an opaque quality as far as semantic meaning is concerned, and perhaps still retains some of its meaning opacity even within the context of a sentence.
For members of the community who use that idiom, there is tacit agreement about what these phrases mean, despite their opaque quality. Languages are cultural entities.
For learners of a foreign language, any foreign language, the culture imbues the language with this opacity. The word table is easily understood and learned, but what about the phrase ‘make a motion’? That phrase has a cultural value that is not easily appreciated or evident to a student. The meaning does not reside in the individual words that make up the sentence. The verb ‘to table’ should initially seem meaningless to a learner. Likewise, ‘a movement’ must seem like an anachronism, having learned that movement is synonymous with the word ‘movement’.
Each culture has its own collection of phrases that are peculiar to it and whose meaning is not obvious. If it were not so, George Bernard Shaw’s adage that the United States and Great Britain are two nations separated by the same language would have no ironic appeal. We apparently speak the same language, the British and the Americans, but both varieties use many different words and have many different phrases that are often mutually unintelligible and sometimes pronounced very differently. Sometimes just the context in which a phrase or word is used can tell angle. Sometimes even the context is not enough. Sometimes we think we have understood when we have not.
This points to another characteristic of language linked to culture; that it exists within a larger entity, that there are localized varieties. What is understandable to a person from one region may be unintelligible to one from another. If this is true within the community of a particular set of users of a language, how much more must it be true for learners of that language. Many students of English, feeling competent, have gone to England only to find the language at worst totally unintelligible and at best iconic but still not quite understandable.
The “cultural weight” of any language, in the form of idiomatic phrases, is understood by members of that cultural community, or perhaps more correctly and more narrowly, by members of that particular speech community, and conversely by not easily understood. understood by those who come from another culture or even from another speech community, although ostensibly within the same culture.
Recognizing that students have or will have problems with ‘real’ English, both written and spoken, is vital if they are to be truly fluent and accurate in the language. Identifying the idiomatic nature of English is vital for fluent and accurate usage and understanding. The word ‘idiom’, defined as ‘an expression that functions as a single unit and whose meaning cannot be resolved from its separate parts’, is often misinterpreted as something more like the words ‘adagio’, ‘proverb’ or ‘proverb’. ‘saying’, however. The enormity of the amount of idiomatic language contained in everyday speech and the written word goes unnoticed by those unable to differentiate between language that is idiomatic and language that is not, and it is precisely because of the pervasive presence of this feature. of the language that makes it ‘invisible’ to native speakers. Culture is, as said before, infused into language, and vice versa. I would even go so far as to say that only through careful control of her own language use is an English teacher able to separate the idiomatic from the non-idiomatic use of her native language. The language learner may not have any knowledge of its presence, and this fact, possibly more than any other, can make the learners’ English sound strange, like non-native, in both the written and spoken varieties. The problem is compounded by the fact that each and every student brings the excess baggage of their own idiom to their learning of English. How often do we read strange-sounding phrases in our students’ written work, phrases that are little more than literal translations from the idiom of their native language? I suggest that we read it every day of our teaching life. The question is: ‘How can we help students to solve this main problem?’
Well, acknowledging that it’s a problem is kind of making a start. Simply criticizing students’ performance by saying that their grammar is poor is totally wrong. In the experience of most teachers, students’ grammatical ability varies, it is true, but I believe that it is in the area of teaching phrases and idioms that most of the ground can be covered in our attempts to improve students’ English. Help students to ‘observe chunks’ in language, or what has been called ‘constituent identification’.
When reading language for specific purposes, such as for Science, there may be little evidence of idiomatic language, although there will be some, but in other varieties, idiomatic language may be an important part and students need help. in the recognition and comprehension of said language.
However, the first and most important step is to recognize the nature of the beast. Although concordant software and dictionaries based on large in vitro language corpora are available, teachers often turn to, or are required to turn to, textbooks that mention little or no idiomatic language and, what is perhaps worse, when they do. mention it, do it in an ironic, dilettante way, treating idioms as adages and sayings, instead of as common features of language.