Iranian EFL teachers’ beliefs and perspectives on incorporating culture in EFL classes

ABSTRACT

Researcher and teacher beliefs towards culture and teaching culture have changed over the last decade. Nowadays, the main objective of language teachers has shifted from teaching communicative competence to intercultural communicative competence. The purpose of this study was to investigate the beliefs and perspectives of a number of Iranian EFL teachers towards incorporating culture teaching into their classrooms. More specifically, the study strived to reveal what Iranian EFL teachers thought about the concept of culture, what cultural information they focused on in their classes, and what obstacles they believed should be removed in order to allocate more time to culture teaching in their classes. The non-random purposive sampling method was used to select the participants for this study. A total number of 10 Iranian EFL teachers with a PhD degree in Applied Linguistics participated in this study. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview and a closed-ended questionnaire based on a 5-point scale. The main finding of this study indicated that even though the Iranian EFL teachers favoured including cultural information in their classes, a number of obstacles prevented them from teaching culture in their English classes. Implications for further study have been provided in the article.     

Integrating language‐and‐culture teaching: an investigation of Spanish teachers' perceptions of the objectives of foreign language education

A recent shift has been noticeable in foreign language education theory. Previously, foreign languages were taught as a linguistic code. This then shifted to teaching that code against the sociocultural background of, primarily, one country in which the foreign language is spoken as a national language. More recently, teaching has reflected on language and culture in an integrated way with a view to preparing learners to use the foreign language in intercultural contact situations. Though in many countries national curricula for the teaching of foreign languages have been slow in the uptake of this shift in thinking, recent curricular guidelines tend to focus more explicitly on the sociocultural dimension of foreign language education, distinguishing between cognitive, attitudinal and behavioural objectives to be attained in the area of language‐and‐culture teaching. This change in focus in curricular guidelines entails a change in the expectations voiced towards foreign language teachers. Research on innovation in education has shown that teachers' perceptions of the innovation to a large extent determine the success of that innovation. This paper reports on an investigation among Spanish secondary school EFL teachers, focusing on the extent to which teachers support the new culture‐and‐language teaching objectives. Our findings suggest that teachers are willing to support the new objectives, but that they experience conflicts when having to prioritize language teaching and culture teaching objectives.     

Culture in teaching English as an international language in CLT curriculum

This thesis explored the role of culture in EIL teaching on the basis of CLT contexts by reviewing plentiful previous studies. Generally speaking, this thesis emphasized the relationship between language and culture, the necessity and importance of culture teaching in language teaching, what kind of culture should be included in cultural content for culture teaching and challenges of culture teaching in EIL teaching as well. In a word, Culture is correlated with language. Culture teaching plays a significant role in EIL teaching. In culture teaching, not only the target culture, but also various cultures related to EIL learners' daily life should be included.     

Are Turkish EFL pre-service teachers ready to manage intercultural challenges?

English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, as the backbone of language teaching system, are expected to raise the awareness level of students’ intercultural communication competence by helping them relate their own culture to foreign cultures, empathise with foreign cultures’ perspectives and tolerate the ambiguities or differences. This study examines the relationship between certain personal factors such as age, gender, year of study, overseas experience and students’ preferences for Turkish movies over foreign ones and three predictors of intercultural communication competence namely, ambiguity tolerance, empathy and open-mindedness. The sample group of the study consisted of 145 prospective English teachers in the Educational Faculty of a state university in Turkey. The participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire consisting of two parts which investigated their background and perceived levels of ambiguity tolerance, open-mindedness and empathy in Turkish EFL context. The results indicated that half of pre-service EFL teachers had poor intercultural communication competence. In particular, males, the final-year students and those who had been abroad indicated higher levels of tolerance than their respective counterparts. Besides, age and students’ preferences for Turkish or foreign movies were not significant factors in any of the predictors of intercultural communication competence.     

The representation of multicultural values in the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture-Endorsed EFL textbook: a critical discourse analysis

In transcultural and transnational communication settings, English learners have to be able to communicate with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. For this reason, English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks, for instance, not only promote Anglo-American and British cultures but also include both EFL learners’ home and international cultures. The present discourse study looks at the cultural content of a nationally adopted EFL textbook in Indonesia. It particularly investigates multicultural values represented in the EFL textbook geared for senior high school students. Findings of the study reveal that four themes of multicultural values emerge from the textbook, such as: (1) respect for cultures of different ethnic and religious groups; (2) respect for cultures of indigenous people; (3) conflict avoidance and peace with all forms of life and nature; and (4) appreciation of creative cultural products. The implications of this textual study suggest that as English plays an increasingly important role as a global lingua franca, multicultural materials from outer and expanding circle countries need to be added to English language teaching (ELT) textbooks. Therefore, English teachers should creatively teach multicultural aspects and use multimodal materials to engage students in culturally laden language-learning tasks.     

浅谈中职英语教学中的文化导入

语言与文化的关系,决定语言教学与文化教学的关系。英语学习包括许多方面,如语法能力、交际能力等,同时也包括学习者对于本族文化及另一种文化的态度。适当地导入文化在中职英语教学中发挥着重要作用。该文论述了文化导入的重要性、原则、内容和方法,目的在于通过文化导入教学提高中职学生的英语语言能力和跨文化交际能力。     

The Role of Premigration Status in the Acculturation of Chinese–Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans

Drawing from fifty in‐depth interviews, this research examines the role of existing parental language knowledge on the ethnic identity negotiation of two ethnically distinct children of immigrant groups—Vietnamese and Chinese–Vietnamese—whose families have emigrated from Vietnam to the Southern California region of the United States. While previous research focused primarily on the influence of premigration status on first‐generation immigrants, this article considers how a central aspect of premigration status (intranational ethnicity) applies specifically to the children of first generation immigrants. By taking the premigration approach of comparing the experiences of different ancestral‐origin groups from a single nation (the intranational ethnicity perspective), this analysis suggests that a family's premigration ethnic status shapes the 1.5 and second‐generation's ethnic self‐identification choices through the mediation of parental language knowledge. Specifically, for the children of immigrants with twice‐minority status (Chinese–Vietnamese Americans), parental language knowledge serves as an easy ethnic identity default during these children's early self‐identification process.     

A comparison of heritage language ideologies in interaction

In Canada, the notion of a heritage language ideology is often conceived of as a natural by‐product of official multiculturalism. By contrast, Germany has long struggled with its status as a multilingual and multicultural country. By comparing two corpora of interviews with immigrants to each of these two countries (Canadians of German heritage and Germans of Vietnamese heritage), this paper aims to explore to what extent these different language ideologies are reconstructed in the interviews. It will be argued that the interviewees construct different sociolinguistic spaces and take up different positions within them in terms of centre and periphery. Our analysis shows that the German‐Canadian interviewees construct public sociolinguistic spaces in which they position themselves as German even when they do not have an active knowledge of their heritage language. By contrast, despite the monolingual habitus in Germany, the German‐Vietnamese respondents endorse a heritage language ideology; the space they claim for speaking Vietnamese, however, is restricted to private or family conversations.     

大学英语教学中学习者母语素质现状及培养策略

在外语教学中,对目的语国家的文化内容介绍已受到重视,但是母语文化的外语表达也不容忽视。文章从教材、课程设置、教师素质等方面对外语教学中母语文化的现状及成因做出分析,并就大学英语教育中如何提高学习者母语素质的问题提出了五点建议。     

Vietnamisation of Southern Vietnam during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

From the third decade of the nineteenth century, the central court of the Nguyen dynasty in Vietnam implemented an ambitious ethnic programme in southern Vietnam, where diverse ethnic groups had co-existed. Under this policy, Khmer, Chinese and other ethnic groups of southern Vietnam were forced to assimilate into the Vietnamese. They had to learn Vietnamese language, dress in Vietnamese style, and follow Vietnamese ways of life. Non-Vietnamese cults such as those symbolised in pagodas, shrines, and statues were also targets of the assimilation policies. Chinese settlers in this region experienced severe discrimination from the central court, forcing them to be reborn as Vietnamese. Vietnamese southerners, who had once been against the central court, willingly joined the vanguard of Vietnamising other ethnic groups. Southern Vietnam, which had previously been ethnically heterogeneous with about 30-35 per cent of non-Vietnamese areas and probably a similar proportion of non-Vietnamese people to the total southern population, began to be actively Vietnamised from this period. This policy, in fact, resulted in ethnic segregation and intense clashes between the two groups: Vietnamese and Non-Vietnamese. On the other hand, this process was an important motivation for Vietnamese southerners to strengthen their affiliation to the king in Hue.     

From cultural knowledge to intercultural communicative competence: changing perspectives on the role of culture in foreign language teaching

Approaches to the concept of culture and teaching cultural competence in a foreign language classroom have been changing over the last decades. The paper summarises, compares, contrasts and evaluates four major approaches to teaching cultural competence in foreign language teaching, that is, knowledge-based approach, contrastive approach, Communicative Language Teaching and intercultural communicative competence approach.     

The Use of Mother Tongue in Second Language Teaching

From the beginning of the 1980 s, more and more attention on the use of mother tongue in second language teaching have been conducted which has been once neglected for a long time. The role of the first language in second language classrooms is always a controversial issue in applied linguistics. Some researchers have believed that teachers should fully use the target language in the classroom. However, many researchers have realized that the mother tongue plays a unique role in second language teaching practice. Based on the previous studies, this thesis aims to explore the influence of using mother tongue in second language teaching, so that the author will provide some helpful implications to assist in Chinese practical teaching.     

Mapuche education and situated learning in a community school in Chile

The article analyses the Mapuche language and culture teaching practices of a rural school in the Chilean Araucanía region run by Mapuche teachers, aimed at reinforcing the language, culture and identity of children. Based on a comparative study of two school ethnographies, the article shows and discusses the ways children learn to be Mapuche by participating of social and communitarian practices reproduced in school. While teaching of traditional core subjects is conducted in standard ways, Mapuche language and culture are taught through the recreation of modes of living, producing and reproducing indigenous traditional knowledge that normally occur in family and community. The maintenance of this ‘bicultural pedagogy’ is grounded on an epistemological claim on the indivisibility of contents from its forms of transmission.     

A Task-based Language Teaching Approach to Developing Metacognitive Strategies for Listening Comprehension

In second (L2) or foreign language (FL) learning, learning strategies help learners perform tasks, solve specific problems, and compensate for learning deficits. Of the strategy types, metacognitive strategies manage and regulate the construction of L2 or FL knowledge. Although learning strategies are frequently taught via teacher demonstration, an alternative but underresearched approach is through embedded instruction in tasks. To develop strategy awareness in language learning, the present study aimed to investigate how well a task-based teaching framework was able to develop intermediate Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students’ metacognitive awareness of listening comprehension. Eighty-eight sophomores participated in the study, which used a quasi-experimental design. The experimental group received strategy-embedded task-based listening instruction for 18 weeks, whereas the control group received only strategy-based instruction. Listening tests and questionnaires were used in the pretest and posttest stages. The results showed that the experimental group improved their metacognitive awareness of strategies for listening and outperformed the control group in the listening test. The students in the experimental group considered tasks to be an important medium of input enhancement for improving listening ability.     

Vietnamese public relations practitioners: Perceptions of an emerging field

Our exploratory research into contemporary PR practice in Vietnam is underpinned by 12 semi-structured interviews with senior Vietnamese PR executives from various agencies. We selectively use professionalism as an underlying theoretical framework to explore key areas of PR as a profession in Vietnam by considering the impact of environmental variables such as culture and the media system. This paper provides a current snapshot of how an industry introduced by Western multinational corporations has adapted to the Vietnamese context.     

Learning Phrasal Verbs Through Conceptual Metaphors:A Case of Chinese EFL Learners

Recent researches in cognitive linguistics suggest that enhancing awareness of conceptual metaphors embedded in the individual words may help second language students to learn idioms. This study examined whether enhancing awareness of orientational metaphors of particles facilitates acquisition of phrasal verbs by Chinese English as a foreign language(EFL) students. The students in the control group learned a set of phrasal verbs through traditional instruction, whereas those in the experimental group received the same input through a cognitive linguistic approach. The students in both groups were then asked to fill in the missing adverbial particles of the phrasal verbs. Results showed that the students in the experimental group performed significantly better than those in the control group, implying that when the target idioms are not stored as a unit in learners' mental lexicon, learners who are aware of conceptual metaphors may rely on metaphorical thought to produce an appropriate adverbial particle. This highlights the implications that EFL learners need to be explicitly taught about the notion of orientational metaphors before they can actively comprehend and produce appropriate phrasal verbs.     

A literature survey of conceptions of the role of culture in foreign language education in China (1980–2014)

The nature of culture and its place in foreign-language teaching (FLT) have been explored at considerable length in Western scholarly literature. These topics have also received the attention of FLT scholars in China, which, with its vast educational system and increasing involvement on the international stage, has the potential to provide an instructive contribution to the debate. The Chinese literature is, however, largely unknown outside the Mandarin-speaking world. We therefore conducted an extensive survey of the relevant literature in China, from its inception in 1980 through 2014. Our aim is to provide a relatively comprehensive overview of the main themes and research perspectives, and the development and current state of culture teaching and intercultural communication studies in that country. This paper presents the main findings of that survey, against the background of the history of Chinese EFL syllabi.

The survey indicates that culture is principally perceived from an anthropological or sociological perspective as the way of life. Culture learning is predominantly viewed as static knowledge of products, practices and perspectives rather than a dynamic process of meaning making. There has been a gradual transition in pedagogical theory and practice from the transmission of knowledge about culture and cultures to the development of intercultural communicative competence. Some innovative and empirically based ideas have been proposed, but our findings suggest that the question of culture teaching in FLT has not yet been explored in a thorough-going and systematic manner.     

The Function of Acculturation and Collective Self-Esteem on Prejudicial Attitudes among Vietnamese American Young Adults

ABSTRACT

This study examined the influence of collective self-esteem and acculturation on prejudicial attitudes in a sample of Vietnamese American young adults. A total of 122 college students from a public university in Southern California were given the Collective Self-Esteem Scale, the Vietnamese Acculturation Scale, and the Quick Discrimination Index. Results suggest that students who were more involved in U.S. culture and had both higher public collective self-esteem (i.e., the belief that their cultural groups were perceived positively by others) and higher private collective self-esteem (i.e., the individuals' private evaluation about their cultural groups) tended to have fewer prejudicial attitudes. Interestingly, results also reveal that students who were more involved in Vietnamese culture and had higher membership collective self-esteem (i.e., the belief in how well they perform in their cultural groups) tended to have more prejudicial attitudes. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Good Governance as Managerialism: Rationalisation and International Donors in Vietnam's Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Sector

Donors’ appreciation of their relationship with Vietnam as a ‘mature development partnership’ requires explanation. Drawing on Rural Water Supply and Sanitation policy, the article argues that the success of donor collaboration with Vietnam is based on Vietnamese political culture coincidentally aligning with a managerialist ‘world culture’, presently extant in the form of neoliberal ‘good governance’ development orthodoxy. The article shows that Vietnam ‘delivers’ rationalised development policy to international donors through its system of state administration and planning, the implementation of target‐oriented planning and the role of statistics in the policy process. The strength of the ‘darling’ partnership is explained in relation to this cultural dimension of legitimacy creation through the performance of rational development planning and administration.     

Surfing the "model minority" wave of success: how the school context shapes distinct experiences among Vietnamese youth

Vietnamese students must contend with the burden of the myth of being a model minority. As a result of adults' high expectations of them, Vietnamese youth receive structural and ideological advantages over other nonwhite racial groups. Further, the students themselves reinforce the model minority image as they attempt to attain educational mobility. The authors examine the role of two distinct school contexts within the same school that shape the academic outcomes of Vietnamese students contending with the pressures of being considered members of the model minority.