Kuwaiti Parents’ Perceptions towards Introducing a Foreign Culture into Their Children’s EFL Textbooks in Public Elementary Schools

Abstract

This study aims to investigate Kuwaiti parents' views and opinions towards introducing native speakers' and international cultures into their children's' EFL textbooks in public schools in the light of recent debates that discuss the relationship between culture and English language teaching. It also intends to explore and discover their perceptions towards the current cultural content being taught in Kuwait public elementary schools. For this purpose, questionnaires were distributed among Kuwaiti parents whom their children study in the government public schools followed by semi-structured interviews to get more detailed and in-depth information about the topic discussed. The findings of this study show that the vast majority had negative opinions and views towards exposing their children to native speaker's cultures for social and religious reasons. One of which is their underlying concern about the negative impacts of native speakers' content on their children's cultural and national identity. However, most of them agreed their children learn EFL through the prism of the international multicultural cultural content to prepare them use the language in different cultural contexts when they grow up. The results also showed that most of them preferred to keep the current ELT syllabus which uses the host cultural content rather than replacing it with the native speakers' one for the same reasons and also in view of growing awareness of the role played by culture in the EFL classroom which propound the nature of the Kuwaiti society of being conservative and cautious.