The Attitudes of Iranian EFL Learners towards Cultural ‎Familiarity

Abstract

The present study was an attempt to investigate the attitudes of Iranian EFL learners towards cultural familiarity. The study was carried out at Irandoostan Language Institute in Tabriz. 60 intermediate EFL learners were selected based on the results of Preliminary English Test (PET). The design of the study was quantitative. Subsequently, the cultural attitude questionnaire adopted from Abbasian, Kouhpayehzadeh, and Asgharpour (2016) was distributed among Iranian intermediate participants to fill out the questionnaire in 10 minutes. The attitude questionnaire includes 8 items on a 4 point Likert scale ranging from 1 “very much†to 4 “not at all†that participants should point out their attitude towards source and target culture. Furthermore, the questionnaire emphasized on four areas including history and geography, the values and beliefs, target cultural expressions, and life style and customs. The results of cultural attitude questionnaire through descriptive statistics indicated that more than half of the participants believed that knowing and learning about target culture is important in English classes. On the other hand, a lot of the participants did not consider source culture as an important factor in English learning classes. The obtained results have some implications for syllabus designers. Syllabus designers can create course books that incorporate different cultures and their culture factors, norms of both source and target culture in the teaching syllabus.