Investigating EFL Students Appreciation of Culture Conceptualization through Cross-Linguistic Morpho-Phonological Analysis Perspective and its Impact on their Cultural Awareness

Abstract

Culture is a complex system that cannot be defined in definite terms, and it is said to consist of many tenets and symbols that form peoples’ way of life and guide their behaviors; such a system is believed to be inseparably connected to language. The latter represents all the meanings necessary for every cultural aspect to be functionally effective. These meanings could be superficial easily perceivable or underlying a surface structure only reached by specific analysis. Our study consists of using Cross-Linguistic Morpho-Phonological Analysis (CLMPA) to reveal those embedded meanings in cultural concepts; it attempts to investigate the students’ appreciation of the concept of culture through CLMPA, eventually hypothesizing the relationship between teaching English and cultural indoctrination. For this purpose, an experiment involving an experimental group and a controlled one and consisting of a teaching session of 15 English concepts representing the cultural content carried out with the experimental group which is a sample of 16 master one students of English at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University in Jijel, Algeria. Then, a questionnaire was submitted to both groups to test the impact of Cross-Linguistic Morpho-Phonological Analysis on students’ cultural awareness (CLMPA). The obtained results have revealed a slight impact of CLMPA on students’ responses with varying impact for each item in the questionnaire. The findings suggest that the study could be of more significance provided that short teaching session is extended to a longitudinal teaching