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Perceptions of Egyptian ESL teachers of teaching aspects of the target culture: The case of culturally-oriented speech acts in textbooks
The study explores issues related to the place of the target culture in the context of teaching English as a foreign/second language in Egypt. There are two research questions in this study. The first one is concerned with identifying the speech acts taught in the Hello! textbook studied by Egyptian...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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AUC Knowledge Fountain
2017
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| Summary: | The study explores issues related to the place of the target culture in the context of teaching English as a foreign/second language in Egypt. There are two research questions in this study. The first one is concerned with identifying the speech acts taught in the Hello! textbook studied by Egyptian students in all governmental and private schools of the third year of General Secondary Education. The second research question investigated the perceptions of governmental and private school teachers on teaching aspects of the target culture in their English classes in Egyptian schools. The research is of a quantitative/qualitative nature. A critical analysis of the speech acts activities from the Hello! textbook has been provided and it was found that only six units out of 18 in the Hello! textbook contain information on speech acts. These six speech acts are: giving advice, making and responding to suggestions, expressing wishes and regrets, offer to help, giving and responding to warnings, and persuading. Using a teacher questionnaire, data from 50 participants teaching at governmental and private schools in Egypt has been collected. This data was supplemented by interviews with three teachers from each type of school for a total of six teachers. The results reported from the questionnaire are in the form of statistics while those reported from the interviews are in the form of descriptive analysis. The results of the study show that the teaching of the target culture and pragmatics in ESL classes in Egypt is neglected due to many reasons, which include the lack of facilities and resources available to teachers, the use of a standardized high school exit exam which does not include questions on cultural aspects, and the resultant washback effect on teachers' and students' attitude toward the inutility of teaching cultural aspects. |
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