Browsing by Author "BOUHIDEL Houda"

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    Submitted in Partial Requirement for the Degree of Doctorate Es-Science in Language and Civilization. Doctorat thesis,(2018) Université de Batna 2.
    (University of Batna 2, 12/16/2018) BOUHIDEL Houda
    The present work attempts at shedding light on the current situation of culture teaching at the Department of English, Batna2 University. It tries to demonstrate that culture teaching has gained a special attention and focus from educators and researchers in our country, especially in the last few decades. However, it seems that the efforts made towards realizing some of the objectives sought from culture teaching are not yielding the desired outcomes. Courses in culture are most of the time considered courses in literature or history and; therefore, are treated negatively by our students, who are still convinced that learning English can be achieved successfully without these courses. Not knowing that, if one hopes to learn the foreign language successfully, he has to give culture learning the same weight he gives to language learning, complicates the task for teachers and educators. Thus, and in an attempt to clarify better the situation and try to suggest some possible remedies to it, we hypothesized that integrating literary texts in the course/s of culture is expected to bring changes in the students’ negative attitudes and behavior by developing their intercultural communicative competence. In pursuing this objective, we made use of two methods, the experimental and the descriptive. Both require the gathering of the necessary data using specific tools. Thus, two questionnaires, administered to two samples from two different populations, second year students and teachers of culture at the Department of English, Batna 2 University, in addition to an experiment, carried out with a sample from second year students, were utilized to obtain the necessary quantitative and qualitative data. Results demonstrated that, although little importance has been accorded to the courses of culture by students learning English as foreign language, the introduction of literary texts, as an alternative teaching strategy to culture, proved very effective in enhancing students’ intercultural communicative competence, and in improving their learning of the target language as a whole.