English Culture Integration in Teaching English as a Foreign Language between Slogan and Reality. An Investigation of the Representation of Culture in Middle School English Text-book.

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the position of English culture teaching in the Algerian Middle school and to get a clear view of the teachers’ conscionsiness of this matter. It anylizes the methods and the materials used to teach this foreign culture as well as to get a genaral image of both teachers and learners’ attitude towards its learning.. The methods used to test the hypotheses include a questionnaire for teachers to get their view about CT in EFL classrooms and a classroom observation to avaluate the integration of culture in teaching curriculum, especially in terms of cultural contents of middle school English textbooks. The findings show that learners are not motivated to learn the English culture and teachers are not aware of the importance of culture and do not give it equal value as it is provided to the four teaching skills. Besides, they do not know how to transfer cultural knowledge appropriately. Textbook disigners are focusing on pure linguistic items such as grammar and vocabulary, and neglect all what is culturally bound.