This study investigated the cultural values in the NorthStar textbook which has been taught since 2008 at An-Najah University as a compulsory course. To answer the questions of the study, content analysis methodology was used. The study revealed that the frequency of cultural values was higher in some units depending on the main theme of the unit. These frequencies ranged between 22 and 274. The religious value had the lowest frequency, while the social value had the highest frequency. Moreover, it was found that the textbook did not only focus on different values of a foreign culture but it also dealt with different cultures. The content analysis revealed that the most frequent cultural values were related the American culture which indicated an obvious bias towards the foreign cultural values in general and the American cultural values in particular at the expense of the Arab-Islamic culture as no unit talked about Arabs or Muslims except the mentioning of the word "Arab" which was mentioned only once in the textbook and in a way that even displeases the Arabs. In the light of the results, the researchers recommended analyzing and evaluating the content of EFL textbooks of foreign authors to be sure that they do not include cultural values that might go against our Arab-Islamic culture. Therefore, careful attention should be paid to how the others are presented and how to filter the undesirable cultural values that in a textbook. Finally, the researchers called for EFL national curricula at the Palestinian universities.
Literature on smartphone technology indicates that smartphones nowadays are almost accessible to everyone with a high percentage even in the least developing countries like Palestine. This accessibility might be due to the various applications, functions and features of the new generations of the smartphones. Hence, the current study aimed to investigate the attitudes of EFL teachers towards using smartphones in the classroom among Palestinian secondary students during COVID-19 pandemic. The study also aimed to find the influence of teachers' gender, years of experience, qualification and the grades the teachers teach on their attitudes. To achieve the objectives of the study, 58 male and female EFL teachers were surveyed through a five-point scale questionnaire and a focus group using Zoom. Results revealed that the attitudes of EFL teachers were moderately positive and that there were no statistically significant differences between the teachers' attitudes due to teachers' gender, years of experience, qualification and the grades the teachers teach. These results shed some light on the readiness of Palestinian EFL teachers to update their methods of teaching and to cope with the ongoing challenges imposed by Coronavirus pandemic.
This study aimed at investigating the approaches used by English teachers in teaching the literature components in English for Palestine, in addition to investigating the effect of gender, qualification, experience and specialization on their use of these approaches. To answer the questions of the study, a 33-item questionnaire was used to measure the perceptions of 52 teachers who teach English in Qalqiliah secondary schools in the first semester of the academic year 2012/2013. The results revealed that the teachers tend to use more than one approach and that not all approaches are used at the same degree or level since teachers' use of approaches ranged from moderate to high levels in the literature lessons. Furthermore, the results revealed that the information-based approach was the most favored approach in the literature class while the stylistic approach scored the lowest level of use. Moreover, the study showed no statistically significant differences for the total degree, nor for any of the domains with the exception of the Personal-Response approach due to gender, specialization and experience. On the other hand, there were statistically significant differences on the total degree of approaches employed by teachers due to qualification.
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