Teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards the use of local culture to raise EFL learners' motivation and improve their classroom interaction
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Date
2018
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Most researches concerning language teaching focus on the motivational factors which realize successful language learning, but they neglect the possible demotivating factors which most EFL learners suffer from. Teaching two foreign elements that is a FL and FC to beginners is one of these demotivating factors. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate social and real life situations from learners' local culture, because learning a language needs a real setting on the one hand and practice outside classroom on the other hand. This study aims at investigating teachers' and students' attitudes towards the use of local culture to raise EFL learners' motivation and improve their classroom interaction. Thus, we hypothesized that EFL teachers and students would have positive attitudes towards the use of native culture to raise EFL learners' motivation and improve their interaction. So as to test our hypothesis, a descriptive method has been conducted, and data were collected through questionnaires that have been administered to thirty (30) third year middle school students, and seven (07) middle school teachers. The results show that all teachers (100%) argued that local culture is a useful technique to raise learners' motivation and improve their classroom interaction. In addition, most of them stated that local culture based content is helpful for learners' productive skills, and it is a remedy to avoid L1 in EFL classes. In addition, they pointed that, teaching English using foreign culture demotivates learners. Moreover, using classroom, social and real life situations is a strategy to warm up learners. Additionally, most students (76, 7%) stated that learning English using real life situations from their culture always motivates them to participate, helps them to understand, and to solve problems encountered in learning English.
Description
Keywords
Interaction, Motivation, Local culture