Raising intercultural awareness through short stories in EFL classes
Raising intercultural awareness through short stories in EFL classes

Summary/Abstract: Teaching culture is an indispensable part of language teaching as language and culture areintertwined. Awareness of one’s own culture and the target culture is necessary to be able tocommunicate efficiently. To raise intercultural awareness among EFL learners, literary sources canbe a great source as they are authentic and reflect cultural elements. The aim of this study was toinvestigate the effect of short stories on intercultural awareness. In this quasi-experimental study,an experimental and a control group were chosen among B1 level of EFL students. The research wascarried out in the School of Foreign Languages at a university in the Western part of Turkey. In asix-week implementation period, the experimental group (18 students) read short stories withcultural themes from different cultures. On the other hand, the control group (19 students) readnonliterary texts again with cultural themes in them. In the study, quantitative data was collectedthrough the Intercultural Awareness Questionnaire prepared by Zorba (2019), and thequestionnaire was implemented as a pretest and posttest to gather data. The findings of the studyshowed that there was no meaningful change in the intercultural awareness of the study groupbefore and after the implementation in terms of intercultural awareness. Furthermore, nosignificant difference was observed between the experimental and control groups. In the study, itwas also concluded that gender and international experience did not lead to a difference in terms ofintercultural awareness of participants. The overall conclusion that can be made from this study isthat intercultural awareness focus in language teaching may ameliorate the language competenceof learners, but it might take time to increase awareness among learners, so institutions shouldprioritize increasing awareness of EFL learners with various activities

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