The effect of English lessons integrated with social studies on achievement and cultural awareness

In today's education approach, interdisciplinary education has become more important than disciplinary education. What is important in interdisciplinary education is that the outcomes of a course are holistic in a way that supports the outcomes of another course. The problem determined in this study is that although the topics determined as themes in the 4th grade English course "Nationalities" unit are within the scope of social studies, students are not ready for these topics and their success remains low. The "Nationalities" unit includes countries, nations, cities and directions. The social studies learning area that can include this unit is "Global Connections". The "Global Connections" learning area includes countries around the world, capitals, Türkiye"s geographical location and neighbors. In addition, it is aimed to respect and raise awareness of different cultures and cultures. Therefore, the "Global Connections" and "Nationalities" units can complement each other and are interdisciplinary in nature. However, the "Nationalities" unit is covered in the first months of the 4th grade, while the "Global Connections" learning area is covered at the end of the year. This situation may cause difficulties in achieving the desired success in English lessons. At this point, the need for this study was felt and it was decided to conduct an interdisciplinary study. The study was conducted using a quasi-experimental design from research methods. The aim of this study is to reveal the effect of the English lesson associated with the social studies lesson on academic success and cultural awareness. The study group consists of 75 students, who were determined from the 4th grade classes in a primary school in the city center of Nevşehir and constituted the experimental-1, experimental-2 and control groups. The experimental-1 group studied the "Nationalities" unit in the English lesson and only simultaneously studied the "Global Connections" learning area in the social studies lesson. The experimental-2 group studied the "Nationalities" unit according to the interdisciplinary lesson plans associated with the social studies lesson and simultaneously studied the "Global Connections" unit. No intervention was made to the control group and they studied the "Nationalities" unit at the beginning of the year and the "Global Connections" learning area at the end of the year as stated in the curriculum. In the study, the achievement test developed by the researcher and the cultural awareness scale developed by Koşar and Çevik (2021) were used as data collection tools. The obtained data were analyzed in the statistics program. As a result, it was found that there was a significant increase in both the course success level and cultural awareness levels of the students in both experimental groups compared to the students in the control group. According to the results between the experimental-2 group and the experimental-1 group, although there was no significant difference between the two groups, the academic and cultural awareness levels of the experimental-2 group increased relatively more. This result,interdisciplinary studies can be beneficial. As a result of the research, it was suggested that interdisciplinary harmony and holism should be used when preparing curriculums. Keywords: Interdisciplinary approach, social studies curriculum, English curriculum, success, cultural awareness.