The influence of cultural topic activities on oral communicative competence with EFL A2 level students

Abstract

Language and culture have an inseparable and mutually dependent relationship. Nowadays, it is crucial for English teachers to provide students with intercultural awareness to develop intercultural communicative competence. Therefore, learning any new language without mindfulness of its culture remains incomplete. The goal of the present study was to see if cultural topics impact in anyway the increment of oral communicative competence in a class of 29 EFL students with an A2 English level at the University Language Institute at Universidad de Cuenca during the September 2016- January 2017 semester. This study was based on the sociocultural theory, where second language students learn through interaction with peers and content-based instruction, which creates context-based communicative situations to acquire English as a foreign language. Four cultural topics were developed in class over a period of 36 hours. The instruments used to collect data included a speaking rubric used for the pre-test, post-test and two quizzes, a students’ perception rubric, a students’ interview, a survey, and a teacher’s journal. Quantitative and qualitative results of this study show that culture-themed activities do stimulate students to increase their oral communicative competence, and therefore, English teachers cannot afford to continue teaching language without culture. Thus, it is the teacher’s responsibility to lead students towards a full oral communicative competence, which can be achieved through culture-themed activities. Cultural awareness motivates students to understand and respect any target language’s idiosyncrasies.