this study investigated the cognition of 70 tunisian teachers on the place of culture in english education. it showed that tunisian teachers believe that english textbooks and curricular documents are not specific about the cultural dimension of efl. it also revealed that l2 teachers, whose mother culture is distant from that associated with l2, hold ambivalent attitudes towards culture. they a...

The present research aims to examine the effects of using culturally oriented texts in project-based classes on the views of EFL university students regarding their L1 culture. To this end, three experimental groups of intermediate EFL freshmen, assigned to classes A, B and C, participated in this study. Each of the classes were presented with reading passages focused on L1 culture, L2 culture,...

in teaching a foreign language (fl), some cultural specificities (defined under the rubric of ‘little-c culture’) may totally conflict with the cultural norms of the learners’ first language (l1). to prevent such imminent problems, this paper recommended that the fl syllabus be designed in a way so as to equip learners with an intimate knowledge of the target language culture, and that language...

This study investigated the cognition of 70 Tunisian teachers on the place of culture in English education. It showed that Tunisian teachers believe that English textbooks and curricular documents are not specific about the cultural dimension of EFL. It also revealed that L2 teachers, whose mother culture is distant from that associated with L2, hold ambivalent attitudes towards culture. They a...

Most research on second language and culture concentrates on learning the target culture in order to better understand the second language. This survey study looks at culture from a different perspective i.e., from the learners’ own culture point of view. It focuses on the relationship that exists between attachment to one’s home culture and comprehending written texts in a foreign language. Th...

This study investigated the relationship of the attitudes and cultural background of Arab students in Israel to their reading comprehension of stories from Jewish and Arab culture. Participants were 74 eighth-grade Arab students (age 14±15 years) from Israel, learning Hebrew as a second language (L2). An attitude questionnaire, stories from Arab and Jewish culture and multiple-choice questions ...

This work investigated crosslinguistic perception of Mandarin utterances conveying six classes of attitudes, i.e., dominant/ submissive, friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and sincere/insincere. Five groups of subjects were tested: native Mandarin speakers, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, naïve Japanese without Mandarin ability, an...

We examined if iconic pictures belonging to one's native culture interfere with second language production in bilinguals in an object naming task. Bengali-English bilinguals named pictures in both L1 and L2 against iconic cultural images representing Bengali culture or neutral images. Participants named in both "Blocked" and "Mixed" language conditions. In both conditions, participants were sig...

This paper examines the reading strategies that four Chinese adult readers use in reading both Chinese and English texts. Their strategies they used are analyzed into two broad categories: the text-initiated strategies and the reader-initiated strategies. All participants demonstrated more strategy use in reading the English texts than in reading the Chinese text. In general, participants were ...