Awareness of Significance
of Language Deficiencies
Explanation: Because language both “embodies”
and “expresses” culture (Kramsch, 1998), it can be
extremely difficult for those outside the culture to fully
grasp language/meaning connections. For example, the
Indonesian language does not have articles, verb tenses,
or gendered pronouns. The sentence “Dia ambil buku”
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translates literally as “He/she take book.” In Indonesian,
one would know from context whether the event had
already happened or not, whether the subject was male
or female, and whether the book was a specific one or
not. When communicating cross-culturally, however,
these contextual clues are not necessarily obvious to an
outsider. I have experienced extended conversations
with Indonesians in English during which I believed an
event to be in the past, only to discover 15 minutes later
that a future event was being discussed!
As I shared such stories with my advanced
Indonesian students, they were aghast.Never before had
they been told of the difficulty English speakers might
have in interpreting statements lacking verb tense,
articles, and other grammatical markers. It was a new
concept to them that such errors were not simply
“grammar mistakes” but did in fact impact communication.
So, understanding the significance of seemingly
small “grammar errors” can be a real eye-opener
for many students. They may have never realized that
such small omissions could have such significant
consequences in communication