Exploring Turkish young learners' attitudes towards using literary texts in English classes for cultural awareness

The purpose of this study was to investigate the Turkish young learners' attitudes towards using literary texts for cultural awareness and to find out how using literary texts in English classes influences the Turkish young learners' cultural awareness. This was a qualitative study. In-class unstructured observations, participant diaries, researcher diary and semi-structured pre-interview and post-interview, which were developed by the researcher, were used as data gathering tools. The participants of this research included 18 students from an eight grade classroom of a middle school in Adana, Turkey. Qualitative data were analyzed by making a content analysis. A coding system was applied in order to categorize the entries within the diaries. The number of the entries in each code and category were calculated. The responses given in the semi-structured pre-interviews and post-interviews were recorded and recurrent and distinguishing answers were detected and analyzed. The results showed that the Turkish learners' have a positive attitude towards using literary texts in English classes for cultural awareness and using literary texts enhanced the students' cultural awareness. The findings of this research may contribute to the research field with the data gathered on the level of middle school and provide insight for the foreign language teachers who would like to integrate cultural studies into their classrooms especially on the level of middle school.