Increasing self-efficacy in reading skill through use of native culture in Turkish elt prep classes

The importance of teaching target language culture in foreign language teaching has become indisputable in the past decades. Studies have shown that learning the target culture makes foreign language learning more meaningful and helps people develop empathy and tolerance towards other cultures. There have been many studies into the teaching of target culture in EFL classes; however, little has been done into the place of native culture in foreign language teaching. It is believed that incorporating the native culture into reading in the target language may provide familiarity with the topic, thus increasing reading self-efficacy and contributing to foreign language learning. Therefore, the aim of this study is to discover whether reading about the native culture in the target language may affect reading self-efficacy and reading marks or not. Reading was significantly chosen because the students are exposed to the target language in EFL classes mostly through reading. The study was carried out for ten weeks with two Level 3 ELT prep classes at Foreign Languages Centre, Çukurova University, Adana using The Reader Self-Perception Scale (RSPS) (Henk and Melnick, 1995), teacher diary, student minute papers and student oral feedback, and comparison of reading average marks. One of the classes was chosen as the experimental group and the other as the control group randomly. RSPS was given as a pre-test to both groups to identify the participants? general perception as readers. Then the experimental group studied ten reading texts that consisted of native culture topics in addition to the texts in the course book and those given by the Syllabus Team of the centre. Meanwhile, the researcher kept a diary and collected minute papers after reading each cultural text. Oral feedback sessions with the students about the texts studied also contributed to the study. At the same time, the reading marks of the students were noted down throughout the first academic term. At the end of the study, the RSPS was given again as a post-test to both groups. Two-tailed t-test in SPSS 17 was used to analyse the quantitative data and descriptive analysis for the qualitative data. The quantitative results showed that there was not a significant difference in the means of Progress, Observational Comparison, Social Feedback and Physiological States between the control and the experimental group. However, there was a statistically significant difference in Social Feedback means between the pre-test and the post-test of the experimental group. This result may suggest that the participants could get better feedback about their reading performance from their teachers and their peers since their schemas about the cultural topics were similar. The qualitative results indicated that the topics about the native culture appealed to the majority of the participants, made vocabulary guessing easier and increased their knowledge about their own culture, permitting them to be able to share it in multicultural contexts.