The golden age of education

The essay I’m writing is based on the movie “Elizabeth: the golden age”. This is a movie that tells the story of Queen Elizabeth and the political, economical, religious and social situations in the XVI century. The most important issue in this movie is not only how entertaining or well done the movie is, but to see the context in which the story develops and understand the importance of these situations in the evolution of England as a country. For the same reason, I consider this movie as a relevant tool for teachers (or future teachers) of English, because language is always linked to culture, and if an educator wants to teach a language, he/she needs to start by giving at least a general context of the culture that express itself trough that particular language.
Now I’ll give you the arguments that reinforce my thesis that this movie is a useful tool for teachers.

First of all, language represents the identity of a group of people. As I said before, language is the representation and expression of people’s traditions, beliefs, costumes, social relationships and so forth, in other words their culture. This movie in particular, gives us an idea of what the foundations of the English culture were, how the identity of the British people began to take form, and with it, we can start understanding what the English language truly represents; not only a language , but a whole culture.

The second argument as relation to the first one about the relationship between culture and language, but goes a little bit beyond. Brown(1994) says that language is context bound. It means that language should not be taught as an isolated issue, but to relate it to the context from where it comes from, in order to make it closer to the students, more meaningful and to assure a better understanding. There are aspects of language (spoken or written) that are closely linked to the culture, for example idioms that represent a specific political issue, or distance between speakers that vary between one culture and another. This is why it is important that students of English know the context and the culture of the language they are learning. It makes their understanding of the language more complete and not only a thing of learning grammar rules.

The third argument has to do with stereotypes and attitudes. Brown (1994) says that people always have stereotypes or make generalizations about people from another culture, and according to these they will have a certain attitude towards the culture and as a consequence, to their language. If teachers made their students watch a movie that represents the culture (or in the case of Elizabeth, the foundations of the country’s culture) of the country where the target language comes from, it will make the process of accepting a different culture or way of seeing easier. It can erase some mistaken beliefs abut a culture and possibly a bad attitude which provokes rejection to learning a certain language.

Finally, when students learn a second or foreign language, a feeling of culture shock comes with it. They feel inhibitions towards the “alien” language, and teachers need to be sensitive in front of this situation and be the guide and facilitator between the language (and culture) of the students and the target language (and its culture). You might wonder how you, teacher, can do this, but do not worry because it’s no that hard. Brown (1994) proposes some ideas like readings, role-plays, simulation games, movies and many more. So here you can see that making students watch a movie about their foreign language’ culture it is useful to make the distance between the students culture and the target one, shorter. Use as many facilitators as you can, any activity related to take your students closer to the foreign culture.

As a conclusion I can say that the relationship between culture and language is very strong. For a teacher (or future teacher) of a language that is not the students native language, it is important to bring the foreign culture to the classroom, because as I have said, it helps the students to understand the target language better, to feel it closer and more meaningful and also to help them deal with their inhibitions and misconceptions about that language and it’s culture. Thus, this movie is a useful tool for teachers because it gives a context to the country and culture of the target language and as I have explained, to know the culture of a language is absolutely relevant at the moment of teaching a foreign or second language.