Culture Teaching in Foreign Language Education:Taiwanese Secondary EFL Teachers’Perceptions of Themselves as Cultural Mediators.

• Main Authors: Chin-chi Lin, 林慶其
• Other Authors: none
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05196439716479840193

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 應用外語系碩士班 === 101 === Recently more and more researchers have advocated the importance to incorporate intercultural competence into language teaching, especially, in the EFL environment. However, there is little research investigating how teachers perceive themselves as a cultural mediator and to what extent that teachers involved an aspect of intercultural competence into their language class. Since the world becomes more and more globalized, it is significant to inquire how teachers perceive intercultural cultural teaching and how they build intercultural competence to their students in their teaching practices. To be more precise, this study conducted a quantitative questionnaire survey and qualitative interviews, aiming to find out:1. What teaching goals do Taiwanese EFL teachers pursue; how do they define intercultural competence? 2. To what extent do they apply intercultural competence into their class.3.what difficulties do they encounter when they teach intercultural competence. There are 95 Taiwanese EFL teachers participating in this study, including 71 female and 21 males. After data collected for the quantitative analysis through SPSS 20.0 program in the study, five participants were invited for an interview. The major findings collected from the questionnaire survey and interviews are presented as follows: 1.Most teachers considering increase students motivation to be the prime teaching goals they pursue; most teachers define intercultural as the ability to contain and tolerate the cultural differences even though their culture is very different from ours. 2.Most teachers equip their students''intercultural competence passively when a specific topic appeared on textbooks,although teachers show a great willingness to support in the survey. 3.Most teachers claim that tight and inflexible course arrangement was the obstacle for them to enhance students’intercultural competence. This study suggests that more teachers attend workshops to cultivate their own intercultural skills and enhance their students to acquire intercultural competence gradually.