Raising culturel awareness for communicative purpose : the case of tourism students learning englsih at the vocational training centre of tlemcen

Abstract

Teaching a language requires culture incorporation since they are intertwined. However, there is still an absence of the cultural component in the ESP language teaching syllabus such as that of English for tourism students at the Vocational Training Centre of Tlemcen which is still restricted to giving lectures on syntactic structures, tenses, prepositions, punctuation, and phonetics. This work tries to find out tourism students’ knowledge of and attitude towards the target language culture with the aim of raising their cultural awareness through the incorporation of culture in the ESP classroom. This case study used three research instruments to answer all these concerns. First, a questionnaire was distributed to twelve students of tourism to look for their cultural needs. Second, an interview was addressed to their English teacher to have an overall idea about students’ cultural knowledge and difficulties in this area. Third, these data were supplemented by those of a classroom observation. The results revealed that infrequent and inadequate cultural content was included in teaching ESP to students of tourism, this led them to have a limited knowledge of the target culture and to develop a negative attitude toward it because of an inadequate incorporation of the target culture in their English course. Therefore, it seems necessary to raise students’ cultural awareness to prepare them to be successful guides in their workplace.