Enhancing EFL Students’ Cultural Awareness through Friends Sitcom

Abstract

The ever-changing global practices have dramatically dissolved cultural diversity, Cultural myopia, and cultural peculiarities in an unprecedented way. These practices reveal the necessity of having a mutual understanding of cultural entities for creating and developing meanings across various cultures. Languages seem to be the vehicle that drives global communication. However, mastering linguistic skills would not be sufficient for understanding the representation of cultural-bound expressions that identify global communication. Hence, the current study attempts to investigate the cultural phenomena substantiated in a sitcom for facilitating cross-cultural communication in EFL/ESL teaching contexts. Friends, as one of the most famous American sitcoms, is used in the study as a corpus to analyze the cultural facets used by speakers in particular socio-cultural settings. The study makes use of the corpus-based method to examine how sitcoms can be utilized for developing EFL students’ cultural awareness. Throughout the study, distinct conversational patterns are meticulously analyzed through discourse perspectives to locate cultural nuances and their impact on developing the meaning of the target culture. Consequently, Sitcoms, as a corpus, have a remarkable impact on increasing EFL students’ cultural awareness of multi-cultural contexts. Building cultural-based activities around sitcoms would expose students to significant cultural aspects beyond the confinement of textbooks and course materials. Attributed to the analysis and the findings of similar studies, it could be proclaimed that sitcoms have great promises for classroom implementation as a repository of authentic resources that would be of extreme instructional value in enhancing EFL/ESL students’ communicative competence in discrete socio-cultural contexts.