Learning English as an International Language: EFL Learners' Perceptions of Cultural Knowledge Acquisition in the English Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Culture is an important element in the foreign language classroom. Some scholars believe that culture is the fifth language skill along with the four traditional skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) of English. Traditionally, learning English required learners to acquire some target language cultural knowledge (e.g. British culture and/or American culture) especially in the context of English as a foreign language. However, with the increasingly important status of English as an international language, the ownership of English has been extensively discussed. Scholars have argued that English is no longer in the custody of any particular country or community. Therefore, whether we should address target language culture in the English classroom or not has become a matter of debate. The study aims to explore EFL learners’ perceptions of the ownership of English and acquiring cultural knowledge in the classroom through in-depth interviews. In total, twenty undergraduates, including both English-major and non-English-major students, from three different universities in Central Taiwan participated in the study. The results show that the majority of the participants reject the notion that English belongs to particular countries in today’s world. In terms of acquiring cultural knowledge, they believe that it is necessary to have some target language cultural knowledge (e.g. British culture and/or American culture) in the English classroom. However, apart from the target language cultural knowledge, they would also like to explore various cultures worldwide, using English as a communication tool to become global citizens. Therefore, rather than debate whether to teach a specific culture or language model in the English classroom, it is perhaps more meaningful and important to develop a language learner’s intercultural communicative competence. These findings provide some insightful implications for English language teaching professionals and educators in terms of teaching culture in the English classroom.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".