Investigating Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Implementing An Intercultural Approach To Teach Speaking. The Case Of 1st Year Efl Learners At Mentouri University Of Constantine

Résumé: This study investigates the attitudes of Oral Comprehension and Expression (OCE) teachers towards the adaptation and implementation of intercultural language teaching insights to teach speaking for 1st year students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at ‘Frères Mentouri’ University (FMU) of Constantine. Regarding those students’ relatively low level in oral proficiency and their remarkable communication deficiencies when using English, the efficiency of the underlying OCE course was questioned. Hence, it was assumed that adapting some insights from the prevailing intercultural approach and incorporating them into class instruction would yield an enhancement in those students’ oral proficiency. However, the teachers’ familiarity with the concept of intercultural education and their attitudes towards the feasibility of teaching speaking inter-culturally was ambiguous. To explore this, we conducted a survey addressing OCE teachers in the same department. Among other things, the questions were centred upon the teachers’ views and perceptions of intercultural teaching approaches, those teachers’ teaching foci, and their cultural content delivery methods. Expectedly, the vast majority of the respondents showed a positive attitude towards making a move from theory to practice in the OCE classroom by concretising intercultural EFL teaching. Eventually, there was a common belief that such a move would contribute to raise the learners’ awareness of the TL community, and enable them cope with the demands of intercultural communication in the contemporary globalized world.

Publié dans la revue: ALTRALANG Journal