Students' opinions of the role of 'culture' in learning English as a foreign language

Abstract

This thesis examines the students' opinions of the role of 'culture' in learning English as a foreign language. The first aim of the thesis is to develop an instrument to investigate students' opinions. The second aim is to explore whether there are similarities and differences among high school students regarding their opinions of the role of 'culture'. In order to do this, the instrument developed by the researcher was applied to 385 senior Anatolian high school students from five different high schools in Edirne, Istanbul, and Diyarbakır in the academic year of 2005-2006. Descriptive statistics for the responses to the questionnaire items suggested that learning English for instrumental purposes, practicing aspects and skills of language, and inclusion of international topics in English language learning process were important. The participants alsostated that native English speaking teachers teach English better than Turkish teachers. However, being familiar with Turkish culture and being able to speak Turkish were regarded as important characteristics of English language teachers by the students. Similarities and differences among different parts of Turkey were explored using analysisof variance (ANOVA) procedures. The results of the analysis suggested that the regions differed on three components extracted by Principal Component Analysis. The responses provided by the participants to the open ended question revealed that mostof the students agreed with the idea of teaching target language culture along with English. However, a considerable number of students disagreed or partially agreed with the idea.