In reading Cultural Competence, I realized that I often think of learning a language in terms of the phonetics and the semantics and grammar instead of learning communicative abilities in various contexts. If we think about it, from a young age we learn to communicate with others - that is the point of speech - to get an idea across (demonstrative), to command (imperative), to express desire in something, or share a part of our identity. A young child will first point to something he wants and say only the part of the word he knows, for example, "ju" for juice. I say this to emphasize Grice's 4 maxims of language learning: I ought to approach language learning as learning to say only as much as necessary for understanding, to say only was it true, and to say only was is relevant in truthfulness. Honestly, I have to admit sometimes I don't do this in English - I meander my way to the point I am trying to make. (for example I could have made that sentence - "I don't express myself concisely").
I also found it interesting that to understand a language, we need to know more than just the words and their meanings, we need to know the context around them. A very good example is where the American teacher says, "Would you like to read?" and the Russian student says: "No, I would not." There are underlying cultural rules that govern our conversations and structure our idioms. For example, a non-native English speaker (and even perhaps someone of an older generation) would not understand the sentence - "Yeah, so my coach got angry at me when I scored a touchdown and then tebowed." They would think, what is this word? Tebowing is to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different. It refers to the famous Broncos quarterback who drops to a knee and prays after every touchdown, while on national television, breaking an indirect norm not to show religious activities at a sports event. Thus, to understand tebowing, you have to know not only the word and its meaning, but the importance of sports, especially football, and the social norms surrounding sports events in America to understand the context. This is the power of the illocutionary force (or intended meaning) of words and phrases in a language.
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