This is a video that explain what is a stereotype and I personally find it  very interesting because  although people use stereotypes a lot and every day, some  don`t even know what a stereotype is:

Stereotypes

A stereotype is to assume something from a culture and generalise it to everyone related to the culture  that is being stereotyped. For example:" U.S people are fat" We are saying that everyone there is fat and don`t have healthy habits, although that not true cause not every person in the U.S is fat and they have very good sportsmen.

A stereotype can be very dangerous  because it is the main cause of cultural misunderstandings between people from different culture, and apart from giving a wrong and simplified idea of a culture they can be very offensive for the person victim of the stereotype.

Now i want to ask a simple question, and that is Why do we stereotype? I personally think that we stereotype to simplify things, because its way more easier to generalise on a culture and get that simple vision, that really understanding that particular culture. When i was doing preparing my presentation  about cultural misunderstandings i understand that they are a very important problem for us to become a more integrated and united world.

What is culture?

Many people had thought what is culture? and as you can think there had been answers from many theorist and experts on culture. Culture as i stated before can have many points of view and in fact what culture can have different conceptions  from each culture.

Some theorist say that that culture is something we aspire to, as says Matthew Arnold:"the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it". Other theorist for example  stayed that culture is something we develop, this is the case of Clifford Geertz  as he makes a metaphor between an spider web and culture in the way that we spun culture, its not something that just appeared but rather is the product of generation after generation of people from cultures that have and are developing their own culture.  I personally like Clifford Geertz ideas because its very logical and comprehensive that culture is like a spider web our society has craft and developed through time

Although there are many points of view about the definition and what is culture, we can say that a culture n simple words is  a society made up of individuals who must learn to adapt to each other and to their environment. The interactive activities  humans engage and teach  make up a culture heritage.

 Week summaries

Week 2

This week we started seeing the history of language, basically when did humans learnt and developed language . We see that Humans managed to develop certain organs that enabled them to produce speech. In Prehistoric times, humankind was in contact with nature. As time passed, these early human groups started developing, having more members, and social needs began to arise as the society became more complex. There is a key moment in history that marked the difference between humans and animals. This is when humans learnt how to walk on two feet. Our bodies changed and we developed what we call the "pharynx", A vital organ for us to develop language.

We saw that language is a creative and flexible tool. As such its always in constant change, because every new generation learn a slightly different form of words and language than the previous one. For understanding better this we saw a video that include a very interesting story, the story of the tower of babel...

The biblical story of the tower of babel help us get a good example of the power language because when god punishes humans for trying to reach the sky, he develop different languages so that people wouldn't understand each other and they didn`t finish the tower because of their arrogance. The history also help us to understand more language diversity.

 Week summaries

Week 1

This week was the first one of the year, We have our first English classes and were presented to Sir Alfredo Calderon, our new English teacher and  Ms Veronica Cordero from PUCV 

(Pontificia universidad católica de Chile). This week we didn`t have many classes but still Sir Alfredo give us a introduction to the English and literature course and what things we were going to see on the next weeks. We were also said to use a very useful tool that we have use a lot, I am referring to our blogs. We also start working on our first activity and start studying like the definition of language, that is unique and inherent to humans and some other staff we do answering to the questions from a video about language, call "Why do we talk" by BBC horizon.

Doctor. Deb Roy

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Debate activity

Between the 19 and 23 of March we perform a debate between ourselves. The idea was to practise for the speaking presentation we were going to have. In order to do the debate we make pairs and all debates focused on one main topic that was:


"Humans are born with an ability to create language" vs. "Language is a learnt construct like the rules governing a sport"


For this activity I work with Garcia and I had to defend that language is a learnt construct like the rules governing a sport.Although we were like the other point of view in class, I didn`t have much trouble to came with some good arguments. For example to defend it I said that if we think for example of a baby that became islated from the world and have never here a word, maybe he will try to communicate, but he would not learn any real world or language as we know it cause he doesn't have someone to teach him. I think that the activity was very good and I really enjoy it and think that is was very useful for everyone to practise their speaking skills.