LANGUAGE AND LITERACY

Language and Literacy

Language and Literacy

Socio-Culture Influences on Language and Literacy Learning

Language is the carrier and the main expressive form of culture. Different nations have different culture history local conditions andcustoms. The culture and social customs of a nation express in its own language. So culture plays a very important role in language teaching.

Young children are insensitive to social variation in language and do not learn to make stylistic choices themselves until early adolescence. Only at the age of eleven to twelve years, full 'stylistic variation' is achieved where the child starts to learn how to modify his speech in the direction of the prestige standard in more formal situations, such as reading loud or an interview with a stranger (Freebody, Luke, 1990). However, If we look at AC5, Band 4, the 8-year-old London girl who is of Jamaican decent, is able to style shift between Caribbean English and British RP during her narration of the story on Red Riding Hood. Being exposed to the social and cultural contexts of her London Caribbean community and her native country, England, she is able to master the styles of both varieties of English. Hence, when she was narrating the Jamaican English version of Red Riding Hood, she pronounced the word "house", using a rising and falling tone phonetically to suit the story. However, during her informal conversation with the speaker's colleague, she style shifted to British RP by using a falling tone for the word "house". From this, we can see how proper social and cultural exposure can help a child to style shift her speech to suit the context of the social situation and young children are also capable of making stylistic choices themselves (Freebody, Luke, 1990).

Children all over the world experience different sets of social and cultural contexts. Hence, it is understandable that the rate and the way they acquire language differs. Children who are brought up with English as their first language are likely to have a taste of their language experience, such as dialogue with a parent figure. He or she learns how to talk at the same time as learning to distinguish the sounds of one particular language and learns to make sense of language per se at the same time as learning the rules of English (Raison, 2002). A bilingual child, who acquires two languages simultaneously, will go through the same stages as that of a monolingual child, with the exception that the corpus of the incoming data will be broader. Separation of vocabularies and of the sound system seems to begin earlier than separation of grammatical systems, but the details vary from language to language and from child to child (Rosenshine, Stevens, 1986) The bilingual child will naturally try to predict a regular pattern of differences in much the same way as the monolingual child will predict regularities within a single language. There is a systematic pattern of phonology and morphological contrasts that helps bilingual children to predict the form of ...