Culture inclusion in EFL classes : a culturally responsive teaching and learning syllabus in higher education

Abstract EN

We need to rethink the teaching of culture in ELT/EFL and put forward arguments for treating culture as a 5th language skill.

Through this article, we are looking at teaching the cultural agenda in more detail and explore any possible avenue of thinking about integrating the EFL learner’s own culture not only to enable him/her compare with the targe language culture but to teach the language in a contextualized field bringing thus a sense for an active learning and teaching process as well as a sound, joyous and communicative environment.

Therefore, the paper at hand seeks to answer the following questions: 1- Is there such a thing as a cultural curriculum or a cultural syllabus? 2- Whose culture should we be teaching and what should we teach at what level? 3- When should we introduce the teaching of culture in ELT/EFL? 4- How do materials address the issue of culture and is it adequate? 5- What kind of methodology is best suited to the teaching of cultures at different levels? 6- What kinds of activities lend themselves to learning about and appreciating other cultures? And 7- Where does culture fit? These points should give us all plenty to think about and discuss.

To provide answers to our queries, we designed a questionnaire addressed to both teachers and EFL learners; and a research methodology based on experimenting this issue as a multidiscipline module.

The results of this experiment not only helped us resort fields of importance to consider as the academic which entailed the linguistic areas as language analysis, psychology which provided concepts about understanding the EFL learners’ behavior and motivation; but much about sociology and anthropology which actually form values in different communities.

Key items: the teaching of culture in ELT/EFL, culture as a 5th language skill, avenue of thinking, teach the language in a contextualized field, active learning and teaching process, teaching culture as a multidiscipline module