The necessity for multicultural counselling to consider the importance of the role of language in the encounter with a new culture

Résumé du document

According to Schmidt, multicultural counselling has four main goals towards someone who is encountering a new culture. These four goals are: to facilitate changes in one's behavior, to improve social and personal relationships, to increase social effectiveness and one's ability to cope and to enhance human potential and enrich self-development. One of the elements that is really important for achieving all these aims is language. Indeed, how could we help someone feel comfortable in a certain culture without taking the linguistic issue into consideration? But before going into the importance of language in multicultural counselling, we have to briefly clarify the relationship between communication, that includes language and culture. In sociology, culture is often seen as something linked to meaningful or symbolic action. In anthropology, Levy Strauss came to consider culture in linguistic terms. Afterwards, culture was understood to be a system of signs. Then, in 1964 the anthropologists Hymes and Gumperz concluded that culture was to be found in "parole", the spoken language. That is why it is important to study the importance of the role of language to encounter a new culture.

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[...] The necessity for multicultural counselling to consider the importance of the role of language in the encounter with a new culture According to Schmidt, multicultural counselling has four main goals towards someone who is encountering a new culture. These four goals are: to facilitate changes in one's behaviour; to improve social and personal relationships; to increase social effectiveness and one's ability to cope; and to enhance human potential and enrich self-development. One of the elements that are really important for achieving all these aims is language. [...]

[...] Apparently, it gives occasion to make hypotheses for one's own constructions of how to come to an understanding of the text. This can be explained by the constructivist theory of learning (von Glasersfeld, 1995), according to which students initially recognise in a text aspects of their own experiences. They make viable their constructions of reality and revise them if necessary. Learning is seen as the development of cognitive systems by trial and error whose purpose is individualisation and socialisation. This shows the importance and the significance of autobiographical contexts and their influence on the reading and understanding of text, but it can also have influence on the understanding of local broadcasts or movies, for example. [...]

[...] “Contextualization and ideology in Intercultural Communication” in Di Luzio, Aldo. Culture in Communication. Analyses of intercultural situations. Dennis O'Neil, http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language_2.htm Duszak, Anna. Us and Others. Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures. Philadelphia, PA, USA: John Benjamins Publishing Company FitzGerald, Helen Gay. How Different Are We? Spoken Discourse in Intercultural Communication: The Significance of the Situational Context. [...]

[...] That is why it is important to study the importance of the role of language in the encounter with a new culture, especially in a situation of counselling. So, in this context, we can wonder in what extent language is important. Why? Is it possible for multicultural counselling to resolve the problems linked with language? Firstly, we will talk about the role and the importance of language in culture in general. Secondly, we will see what the main issues are in teaching and learning a foreign language in intercultural communication. [...]

[...] In a first time, we can analyse discourses that some international students have about their own experience with a new language and a new culture. Seven students have answered to four questions about their current experience of living abroad. Six of them are French students studying or doing an internship abroad, whereas the other one is a Belgian exchange- student in Finland. In analysing their answers, we can notice that most of them had problems at least in the beginning of their stay with the obligation to speak another language than their own. [...]