Variations and Cultural Awareness in Learning EFL

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Variations and Cultural Awareness in Learning EFL “Culture is probably the most controversial aspect when talking about differences among countries in the world. It is here where all the divergence is born and reflected in the language since it is the most common way to communicate among humans.” Chinger Zapata, 2007 This statement shows that when learning a foreign language, culture should be the first element to consider, since language itself is undoubtedly connected to a huge amount of social and cultural issues. Countries that share the same language have cultural, lexical, grammatical, and phonological differences reflected in it in one way or another. This is the case of Spanish, English, French and Portuguese among others, which happen to be languages shared by countries in different locations of the world, leaving as a result, an amazing tongue enriched by the various peoples that speak them around the globe. This kaleidoscope of verbal communication forms is possible because a language belongs to the group of people who speak it, and a word or saying means what that speech community has made it mean. So language is based on agreements, and the agreements are in many cases different between one standard of language and another. This allows us to establish that no matter how many countries speak one language, the language commonly spoken by several countries will most probably be different in each place despite the similarities. English, if not the best, is an excellent example of this assumption. There are, in the world, many people who have learned English as a mother, second or foreign language and in many cases these people may be, at one time or another, confused with a particular word or phrase from an English speaker coming from another country
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