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.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture teaching
• EFL teacher beliefs
• foreign language education
• intercultural communicative competence
• language learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maedeh Ghavamnia

Maedeh Ghavamnia has a PhD in Applied Linguistics and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Art University of Isfahan. She teaches EAP and ESP courses to undergraduate and graduate students majoring in Architecture, Urbanism, Industrial Design, Painting, Handicrafts, and Miniature. She is interested in SLA, L2 reading, L2 culture, and pragmatics. She has published a number of articles in international journals such as: The Language Learning Journal, Reading Psychology, and Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching.