Language and cultural values : the ethnolinguistic pathways model

Abstract

It is important for non-native speakers to acquire as soon as possible a relative aware-ness of the cultural values and the communicative norms which prevail in the language community of their speech partners. Immersion is usually the means recommended to achieve that end, as it is through immersion in a foreign culture that differences with one‟s own culture come to the fore. The hypothesis on which this paper is built is that judicious exploitation of selected resources of a foreign language in the (advanced) for-eign language classroom is likely to facilitate subsequent immersion: five ethnolinguis-tic pathways, which may appeal to researchers as well, will be defined to help with the discovery and/or increased understanding of the values upheld by those who have ac-quired the foreign language from birth. The aim of the “ethnolinguistic pathways model ” is to illustrate how the study of communicative behaviours, phrases, key words and productive syntactic patterns can lead to the discovery of putative cultural values which are then to become the subject of further investigation leading to either the con-firmation or rejection of their assumed status; and also how, through detailed study of

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