Non‐native English language teachers’ perspective on culture in English as a Foreign Language classrooms

Abstract

This article examines the importance of raising non‐native English language teachers’ awareness of different dimensions of culture in the teaching of English as an international language. The author believes that the more critical English language teachers become about the involvement of culture in their English language teaching, the more they equip their students with the necessary linguistic and cultural resources to be able to communicate with people from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The study comprises the development and implementation of a semi‐structured interview. The participants are a small group of Turkish teachers of English working in public and private schools in Turkey. Drawing on the results of the interview study, the author shows that there is a general consensus among the participants of the study on the practice of referring to an ‘international culture’ with special emphasis on English‐speaking Anglo‐American cultures, as well as the learners’ local culture in the English as a Foreign Language classroom. Moreover, the results also reveal the participant teachers’ belief that being a non‐native English‐speaking teacher is an advantage as far as cultural and linguistic issues in the English language classroom are concerned.

Acknowledgement

This study has been funded by Bogazici (Bosphorus) University Scientific Research Projects, Istanbul, Turkey, Project Code 04HD601 and TUBA (Turkish Academy of Sciences) Postdoctoral Research Grant 2003. I would like to thank the graduates of the Department of Foreign Language Education who helped me in collecting the data between the years 2003 and 2004.

Notes

1. When so many different English‐speaking countries are taken into consideration, ‘native speaker’ as a concept becomes a problematic term to define—i.e. who to consider as a ‘native speaker’, ‘who are native speakers of English’ and so on. Since it is not the main focus of this article I will not discuss it here and will use the term in general referring to all English‐speaking countries (India, New Zealand, Australia, etc.). For more information on this issue, see Canagarajah (1999) and Graddol (1999).

2. See the Turkish Ministry of National Education (2005a).

3. The URL of the Turkish Ministry of National Education web site is: www.meb.gov.tr

4. The duration of secondary education has been recently changed to four years (Turkish Ministry of National Education, 2005b).