언어를 통해 보는 한국과 미국 간의 사고 유형의 문화적 차이

Cultural Differences of Thought Patterns between Korea and America - in the sight of a language teaching -

As fish cannot live without water, human beings cannot live without social activities, either. Thusby, human beings create their cultures in the course of being in social groups. Culture plays a crucial role in second language teaching because a language is a part of culture and a culture is a part of language, respectively. On the basis of the above, the purpose of this paper is to understand Why is the culture component so crucial in second language teaching? In fact, the ability to interact with speakers of another language depends on not only language skills but also comprehension of cultural habits and expectations, and successful cross-cultural communication entails a great deal more than language skills. It is common to emphasize the important of a culture teaching and to remark that a language and a culture are intertwined nowadays. With regard to these, it is impossible to teach a language without culture that is the necessary context for language usage. However, there can be various obstructive elements concerned with cross-cultural communication. Among them, culture shock is especially thought to be one patten of anxiety that is resulted from the loss of commonly perceiving and understanding social intercourse. As one way to settle down and overcome culture shock, the relation within second language teaching and second culture teaching must be understood exactly. Also, socio-cultural background and emotional background entailed into language are perceived. Obviously, the concept that “language is culture” is inevitable in order to understand the cultural differences of thought patterns between two countries, Korea and America.