UNIVERSIDAD DEL ATLÁNTICO

STUDY GUIDE No 9

Teacher: Mercedes Castillo Barrios

Student’s name:

Unit No 10 Communication (introduction)

2021
 Study Guide No 9
Week No 10- due date: Friday, January 15th, 2021
Unit No 10 Communication
SLOs (Student Learning 1. Compare and talk about the things
you have.
Objectives)
2. Talk about languages.

3. Ask for help.

4. Write a post expressing an opinion.

HOW LANGUAGE SHAPES THE WAY WE THINK

TEDTalk – Lera Boroditsky, cognitive scientist

A. Before you watch, discuss: How can language influence the culture of a people?
Language influences people's culture, so that there are social constructs in a given society that are
accepted within that community and are seen differently by outsiders, languages shape ways of thinking

B. Listen to the introduction of the video and complete the missing words from the excerpts. (0 - 2:27)

1. …We can transmit really complicated _______THOUGHTS__________ to one another.

2. …and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and
________TRANSFORM___________ them into thoughts. I hope.
3. …We're able to transmit ________KNOWLEDGE___________ across ________OUR
MINDS_____________.
 4. …Some languages have different ________SOUNDS__________, they have different
______VOCABULARY___________, and they also have different ______STRUCTURES_______________.
5. …Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "To have a __________SECOND__________
_____LANGUAGE___________ is to have a second ______SOUL_____________"
6. Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we have
actual ______DATA___________ ________________ to weigh in on this question.

The introduction gives the main idea of the topic. What is the main idea of this TEDTalk?

C. Li
st
e
n
to

the body of the text. Write the details that she uses to support her main idea. Then write the example(s)
she gives to explain each. (2:28 – 10:55)

Example 1: She worked with aborigines who did not use the words "left or right" but cardinal points,
example, look at that ant to its south west, move that glass to your north west, it's a little strange

Example 2: she used images of her grandfather at different ages, and English speakers organized the time
differently than a Hebrew or Arab

Example 3: Humans list things by numbers, in this case a group of penguins, but languages are not like that,
because there are no exact words to define numbers

Example 4: Some languages have many words to define colors, others have few words like "clear" and "dark",
for example Russians are limited in naming colors

Example 5: Many languages have grammatical genera, each noun is assigned a gender, usually male or female,
example the sun is feminine in German but it is masculine in Spanish

Example 6: In languages we also differ the way of describing events, example what we consider an accident,
English speakers will remember who made the accident while Spanish speakers did not remember it
D. From the conclusion part of the video, put the ideas that the author says in order (a-g from 1-7)). Number
1 would be first, 2 second, and so on. (10:56 – 14:05)

1. “What we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased.”
___5___

2. “Language can shape things that have personal weight to us -- ideas like blame and
___1___
punishment or eyewitness memory.”
3. “And that gives you the opportunity to ask, ‘Why do I think the way that I do?’ ‘How could I
___6___
think differently?’”
4. “Of course, if you don't count, you can't do algebra, you can't do any of the things that would
___7___
be required to build a room like this.”
5. “The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible
___2___
the human mind is.”
6. “Half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years.”
___4___

7. “Languages, of course, are living things, things that we can hone and change to suit our
___3___
needs.”

After watching the presentation, answer the final questions.

1. How does this video make you think differently about languages?

This video makes me reflect a lot, because it tells me that I have to mold myself and adapt to the culture and
understand much more the intrinsic part of the language to fit into it and recognize each of the patterns that
are embedded in it.

2. What do you think the author wants her audience to do?

The author wants her audience to understand the different cultural points of view that languages have and
how they adapt to the society where they live and are different from others