Cultural issues in Syrian EFL classrooms

Abstract

Whether we should teach culture or not when we teach English as a Foreign Language has been great concern for a long time. Which one should be contained in EFL course books? The culture of the target language or the own culture of EFL learners? Regarding this issue, many researchers have a diversity of opinions, however; this study was conducted having resource to descriptive research design, in that it aims to understand the perspectives of the Syrian EFL students on cultural elements in their course books. A questionnaire and an interview,which were administered to 103 Syrian EFL students,were used in order to gather the required data. SPSS(v20.0), aStatistical Program for Social Sciences was employed in order to analyze the collected data. As a result of the findings, it was found out that Syrian EFL students had generally positive perspectives on the cultural elements of the target language contained in their course books