Analysing Students’ Reactions to English Course Books in Terms of Cultural Elements

There is a growing consensus among researchers that foreign language learning and teaching implies some degree of learning and teaching a foreign culture. If language learning is considered as a process, culture learning is one of the components of this process. Pursuing Hyme‘s communicative competence theory, contemporary foreign language teaching methods have a special focus on sociolinguistic competence which is the knowledge of sociocultural rules of language. This aspect of language is conveyed to language students through teachers as a core-source or the materials employed in classrooms. Language teachers, implicitly or explicitly, relay cultural information to their students. However, in countries like Turkey where English is a foreign language, the core-source of cultural issues is course books rather than teachers who themselves may not be competent enough in target cultural issues. Therefore, course books are of great importance in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) settings like Turkey. There have been lots of debates recently on whether or not to include target cultural elements in foreign language course books, and on to what extent they should be presented. There are different views about presenting culture in course books in the literature. Some scholars claim target culture-specific elements should be presented in a systematic way, as from familiar to unfamiliar. A number of researchers put the emphasis on the functions of course books and specifically on cultural elements as being one of the functions. Some researchers complain about course books focusing on merely target cultural elements while some think that EFL course books should only consist of native cultural elements. Results of some comparative studies indicate that the quantity of target culture-specific elements is not enough for learners to make them culturally competent language learners. There is no doubt that it is the language learner who is at the centre of the discussions. For this reason, students‘ reactions to culture specific elements in the course books and the impact of these reactions to their language learning development are extremely important. The present study, therefore, aims (a) to analyse the reactions of the students to target cultural elements, (b) to determine whether their majors have an impact on their perceptions of culture, and (c) to get an idea about whether to include native culture-specific elements in the course books as well. In order to reach some conclusions about these topics, the following research questions have been posed. 1. Should native cultural elements be integrated into the course books? 2. Are the students motivated enough to learn target cultural elements? 3. Do target cultural elements have a demotivating effect on students? 4. Do students‘ majors and faculties have an effect on their perception of cultural elements in the course books? Within these questions in mind, data were collected from 100 freshman students studying in the Faculties of Theology and Engineering in Ondokuz Mayis University in 2011-2012 academic year. As a data collection tool, a Likert-type questionnaire was employed to get the reactions of students to culture specific elements available in Foreign Language 1 (English) course book. The course book students were following was chosen by a committee in School of Foreign Languages at the beginning of the academic year. T-test was employed to analyse the data. According to the results of the study, there existed statistically significant difference in the responses of students in two faculties especially for five items. The first issue, which revealed a significant difference, was about the relationship between the two groups‘ worldviews and the content of the course book. Theology students‘ reactions to the item related to the consistency of their worldviews with the cultural elements in the course book were different from the ones in the Faculty of Engineering. The other significantly different issue was about contribution of special days and names of the target culture to students‘ language development, and advantage of these elements in interacting with the target culture. In addition, results revealed that target cultural elements were not motivating and interesting enough from students‘ points of view. Some open-ended questions were also addressed to the students to get an idea of what they would like to see in foreign language course books. Results from open-ended questions indicated that most of the students were eager to learn culture specific elements and they had some suggestions on native cultural elements to be added in the course books. Another striking result obtained from open-ended questions was that almost half of the Theology students declared that target culture-specific elements had demotivating effect on their language learning process.