Language: The Importance Of Perception In Foreign Language

Review of Literature

Language encompasses not just perceptions toward grammatical gender, but culture as well. Essentially, language shapes the way one processes information not only because of cultural connotations underlying the meaning of a word or phrase, but due to the limitations of the language itself. The ability to form a sentence is limited by the structure of a language, and the ability to express oneself in the same language is limited by how one can think in that language. This is precisely why there exist “untranslatable words” across the spectrum of languages, and hence moulds thought itself (Chomsky, 1957)(Ross, 1976).

Language and Perception

There is justification that perception alters with language. In fact, auditory perception

Ross also looked into how these errors were related to the meaning of distinctions between languages and whether or not students identified these distinctions and employed them when tested in the foreign language. These studies showed that about 68% of the errors made by students of foreign languages made mistakes concerning meaning distinctions. This evidences that being able to discern between two languages and internalising these distinctions with one’s thinking would have reduced the number of errors committed by the students (Ross,

It is the ideology of this culture that brought the conception of a particular thought system into language. Neither culture nor thought can be understood in isolation as both create the resulting thought. According to Nelson Brooks, much of a language is unintelligible outside of its culture because the referential function of the language often deals with things, concepts, assumptions, and categories unique to the culture (Bedford, 1981).

Culture and Foreign Language Acquisition

In realising that language and thought are not one but a combination of multiple factors, the basic purpose of foreign language learning must not be lost. The aim of foreign language learning is to gain the expertise required to converse with the target language’s population. There is a scarcity of literature about the perception of members of a culture of others as well as themselves (Hall &Ramírez, 1993).

Language learning through content is not a new idea. What is new is the idea that the content of the language classroom be structured by intercultural interaction. If we recognise that such learning is indeed invaluable to the language learner, then a focus on the development of intercultural communication in foreign language learning is worth of serious attention (Hall & Ramírez,