Yabancı dil sınıflarında kısa hikayeler ile kültürlerarası farkındalığın artırılması

Teaching culture is an indispensable part of language teaching as language and culture are intertwined. Awareness of the self-culture and the target culture is necessary to be able to communicate efficiently. To raise intercultural awareness among EFL learners, literary texts can be a great source as they are authentic and reflect cultural elements. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of short stories on intercultural awareness. In this quasi-experimental study, a treatment and a control group were chosen among some students at B1 level. The research was carried out in the School of Foreign Languages at a university on the west side of Turkey. In a six-week of implementation, the treatment group (18 students) read six short stories with cultural elements from different cultures. The short stories were The Relative Advantages of Relearning my Language by Amy Choi, Cat in the Rain by Earnest Hemingway, Eleven by Sandra Cisneros, Shame by Dick Gregory, The Beauty of Difference (Anonymous), and You Can't Choose Your Memories by Paul Nguyen. On the other hand, the control group (19 students) read nonliterary texts again with cultural themes in them. In the study, a mixed methods design was used. The quantitative data were collected through the Intercultural Awareness Questionnaire prepared by Zorba (2019), and the questionnaire was implemented as a pretest and posttest to gather data. For the analysis, the independent sample t-test and the paired samples t-test were administered. Also, the qualitative data were collected through a focus group interview. The quantitative findings of the study showed that there was no meaningful change in the intercultural awareness levels of the study group before and after the implementation. Furthermore, no significant difference was observed between the treatment and control groups. In the study, it was also concluded that gender and international experience did not lead to a difference in terms of intercultural awareness of the participants. The qualitative findings of the study showed that the intercultural awareness levels of the participants were on the developmental stage. The overall conclusion that can be made from this study is that activities to promote intercultural awareness should not be underestimated. Not only the British and American cultures, but also other cultures should be integrated into culture teaching. Lastly, teachers should prioritize increasing intercultural awareness levels of EFL learners with various activities.