Abstract
Culture, a commonly visited concept in English language teaching research, has been integral to language classes. The present study investigated the place of culture in English as a foreign language classes for ten English language instructors teaching at tertiary level across state and private universities in Turkey. The findings revealed that the English language instructors’ opportunities to raise their students’ cultural awareness were not satisfactory, and there was a mismatch between their wishes and practices. This mismatch was mainly attributed to learners’ lack of motivation/interest and their opportunities for visits abroad. The findings also indicated that the participants’ conceptualization of culture in English language classes was predominantly modern, i.e. either as part of the humanistic (big C) paradigm representing canonical literary work produced via a standard language or sociolinguistic (little c) paradigm representing everyday interaction, communication, and patterns of behavior.
Highlights
The current study aims to investigate how Turkish English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers understand the cultural component in language classes and the extent to which they feel to have opportunities to raise cultural awareness
The answers to the first question on the questionnaire showed that half of the participants have been to countries where English is spoken: mainly England followed by the United States and Canada
The current study aimed to explore the extent to which the EFL instructors have opportunities to raise their knowledge about the target language cultures, the place of culture in EFL classes, and their opinions and practices on the teaching of culture
Summary
The current study aims to investigate how Turkish English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers understand the cultural component in language classes and the extent to which they feel to have opportunities to raise cultural awareness. There are several definitions of culture: “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (Hofstede, 2011, p.3), “a common system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting” (Kramsch, 1998, p.10), “a subjective, portable, entity, linked to an individual’s history and his/her variable subject position in variable context of language use” (Kramsch, (2010, p.281) All these views focus on the different aspects of the concept of culture, agreeing that it is not possible to reach a concise definition of the term. We conclude with implications of this study for teaching English in higher education and language learning contexts
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