Teaching Culture to EFL Learners through British/American 20th Century Short Stories

Abstract

Many students and teachers learn/teach short stories without paying big attention the culture within them. This lack of attention to culture is thought to be the reason behind the difficulty of communicating in the English language. The present research aims to investigate the effectiveness of teaching short stories to students to enhance their cultural knowledge. We hypothesize that teaching short stories does help students acquire cultural knowledge. To achieve this purpose, an experiment was conducted and a questionnaire was administered to the first-year Master students of English at Abdelhafid Boussouf University Center-Mila. The experimental group had regular sessions in which they were taught short stories. The experiment was followed by a questionnaire to strengthen the reliability and validity of the results; the two research tools enabled the collection of quantitative and qualitative data. In fact, the questionnaire aimed mainly to know the participants' impressions about their experience of learning culture. After the analysis of the data gathered and the interpretation of results, we were able to confirm the hypothesis we laid at the very outset: learners can, to a large extent, acquire British/American culture via teaching British/American short stories. However, the results remain ungeneralizable for the sample of the study was very limited in number. In spite of this inadequacy, the research ended up with supplying some pedagogical recommendations for both foreign language teachers and learners, and directions for future research.