Attitudes of Parents towardsTheir Children???s CultureLearning in an EFL Setting
Abstract
Nermin PUNAR, Cigdem KARATEPE
JournalofForeignLanguageEducationandTechnology,4(2),2019http://jflet.com/jflet/324Attitudes of Parents towardsTheir Children’s CultureLearning in an EFL SettingNermin PUNAR(nerminpunar@gmail.com)PrivateBursaKültür Schools, BursaORCID: 0000-0001-8772-0075Çi??dem KARATEPE(cigdem.karatepe@gmail.com)Uluda?? University, BursaORCID: 0000-0002-2902-6656Abstract: Language and culture are inseparable terms andin many researchers’ opinions,such as those of Byram (1988), Kramsch(1993), and Brown (2000), they should be integrated during the foreign language teaching process. Manystudies have been conducted about the effects of culture teaching on language learning, or the views of both language teachers and learners about targetculture teaching while learning a foreign language. However, there is very limitedresearch examining the effects of parents on their children’s foreign language learning processabouttarget culture teaching. Basedon this gapin the literature, the present paper attempts to find out what parents think about the target culture in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes, and to identify whether there is any difference between the attitudes of parents considering their educational background, whetherthey know a foreign language, and whether they have beenabroad before. One hundred and nine parents participated in this study,anda mixed research design was used. The quantitative data were analyzedby using descriptive statistics, independent samplest-test and one-way ANOVA, and the qualitative data were collected by interviewsand analysedby content analysis. As a result, it was foundthat some parents believe that culture is important and a good way to learn a foreign language; however, some of them do not believe that it is necessary for language learning. The majority of the parents believe that learning about a foreign culture could harm their children’s own cultureand that they can learn the target language without beingexposedto the target culture. The detailed results are discussed.<
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