How to link language and culture into teenagers of today.

The relationship between civilization, culture and language, may sound a little bit crazy but if you analyze the concept you will see that the three of them are related. This is what you are going to read in the next topic. How is it that the construction of a language is basically the cultural base of a society? How this is one of the first steps to the formation of a civilization, how is it that these terminologies are related to our teenagers, and how can them being linked them to education.

The main point here is that when you ask someone about what civilization is? These people usually have no idea, recently I did a questionnaire and many people tended to confuse culture with civilization.To understand the whole context, the first thing that people need to do is to define civilization, which not many people know how to do it. The Cambridge dictionary defines civilization as: “a highly developed culture, including its social organization, government, laws, and arts, or the culture of a social group or country at a particular time” < http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=civilize*1+0&dict=A >. The definition made in the Cambridge dictionary is actually the one that put together all the concepts that I am trying explain. A civilization is in simple words, a group of people who work together and share the same cultural bases.

Now, the subject that comes immediately after civilization is culture, this is because these terms are really close related, culture is everything that a group of people share, like for example religion, customs and special celebrations. It can be said that each family have different culture. The Cambridge English dictionary defines culture as: “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time”< http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=18888&dict=CALD >. Nowadays, there are some things that can be also called culture; these new sub-cultures that are now among the teenagers, like “Pokemons” and “Visuals”, but I’ll talk about them later.

You must be asking yourself, what civilization and culture have to do with language? Well, it turns out that with out language the simple idea of culture or even civilization is impossible. For example England, which is one of the most powerful countries in the world, was once just a small group of people with no country and land. They arrived to what is now England from near countries, like Germany, Finland, France, etc… and as you can realize by now, English is actually a mix of different languages. But they weren’t a country until they develop their own writing system, which opened a lot of new windows to a developing country. As you can read, language is one of the most important tools in a civilization and culture, it is something that as I said before, a group of people share and exchange.

Consequently, the relationship between civilization, culture and language is always going to be important. These concepts are what keep people unified, in other words you can know what other people like throughout speaking. You realized that you may share some activities, and then with out even noticed you have developed a really important bound like a friendship. The simple terminology of civilization, culture and language can be pertinent in different context and that’s how you can introduce the importance of language to a class.

I think that teenagers nowadays are creating new ways to express themselves, and this is actually something that can be used to teach English or any other language. Young people understand themselves as unique individuals that need to be with a group of people who understand and think like them. Therefore, making them noticed that they are behaving like small societies, with different customs and among them they use special slang that make them unique. Pokemons, Visual, Aggros, etc… are sub-cultures that as a society or cultural group share opinions, ideas and in some cases special ideologies. Throughout all this you can try to introduce the importance of languages in a class, and hopefully kids will feel more in touch with the subject.

Concluding, the relationship between civilization, culture and language is something that interests us all, because believe it or not we are all part of a society that works together for a common goal.

"Modern Times" by Charles Chaplin

Modern times is a movie that tells us the story of 2 different characters, first: Chaplin’s character, who was a hard and funny worker. And a girl, who helps her family. Her father was unemployed and as he couldn’t bring food to the house, she felt the impulse of do it herself by stealing it.
In this movie we can realized many facts that were real in those days, when the life as we know it stared. The first thing that call my attention during the movie, was the very first scene, when the screen shows us a group of sheep and then the scene changes showing us a group of people walking together. I think this is a metaphor that was trying to show us that in these new days that were coming, industrialization, people was starting to act and fall into a routine of work, where they are no more than a sheep that works for the factory.

The film also shows us how people were all the time looking for a stable job, and how riots, famine and theft where things of everyday. What seems more interesting in this film is that even though many people were suffering the consequences of not having a job.

Some other people were having a very good time because there was a department store full of food and clothe, there was also a restaurant where people were eating and dancing really happy.

In this movie we can see both sides of the coin, the side of the poor people who work really hard to kept a job and the rich people who had all the benefit of the industrialization but suffering the consequences, like the pollution and the delinquency.
I can say after everything that Modern times is one of Charles Chaplin’s master piece, where he showed to the world the reality of the industrialization days, and what people was able to do to survived. At the end of the movie, both characters left the city together really happy and with a lot of hope in the future, I interpreted this as a message from Chaplin to society, that even though thing may look really hard, we have to be strong and fight for the future.

Age of reform or sacrifice

If we star thinking about the industrial revolution and the consequences that brought to the English society, we could realize that many people suffered during this hard process.
To make a clear idea of the issues, we have to understand that in those days a new era was breaking into the country, which was supposed to bring successful and greatness to England and their people, but instead of that, the industrialization of big companies was a potential bomb.
Thinking that England was already in a bad economic time, the industrialization was supposed to repair everything and help the country to star going up again. But with machines in the factories less people was needed and the number of people with out work grow up amazingly.
We have to considered that there was many people coming from town to work in these amazing factories and their machines, but these working conditions wasn’t healthy. People started to have diseases because of the working condition and what was most scary of all, was the fact that kinds were working too.
People in those days never thought about the impact of all the town people coming to the city, we are talking about overpopulation, insane working conditions, kinds working or stealing on streets and famine. Besides, the new machines were causing pollution, something that was completely new in those days.
If we read the poem “the cry of the children” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), which I think show the reality about the conditions that children where living, we can have an example of what was going on.
To conclude, the main problem was the overpopulation in cities that weren’t prepared for such arriving. Moreover if we think about of the people coming from different parts of the country we’ll se that these people brought to the big city, their slangs and languages variation. Mixing the English that people talked in the city with the different slangs and accent of the countryside. The Victorian age or also called, the age of reform, was a painful time for English people where the only winner was technology evolution.