ABSTRACT
As language teachers we are the most fortunate o f teachers — all subjects are ours. Whatever the children want to communicate about, whatever they want to read about, is our subject matter.
(Rivers 1972: 68)
Learning a language is not only about assimilating the rules o f a grammatical system. We have come to understand that the process is far more complex than that, not least because language cannot be separated from the culture to which it belongs. In the short passage which follows from Lucia Graves’s autobiography, we see how lan guage is culturally laden and how the fascination o f languages lies as m uch in the cul tural impact o f words as in the words themselves. Daughter o f the poet Robert Graves, she was brought up in Majorca when not at school in Switzerland. Through this short extract we can see how impoverished language learning is if taught in isola tion from culture. This is her analysis o f the Spanish word mort or ‘dead’.
