IMRPROVING STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION COURSE THROUGH THE USE OF CULTURE-BASED LITERARY TEXTS: AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH THE CASE OF SECOND YEAR STUDENTS AT THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF BATNA

Abstract

Acquiring a basic understanding of the culture of the people whose language is being taught has become a prime objective in foreign language education. With the world changing so rapidly and bringing cultures close to each other more than anytime before, has made it so. Actual practices in classrooms, however, reflect a continuing carelessness toward the civilization courses, whose significance goes beyond mere historical narration to the past. To bring change to the above-described situation, this research attempts to investigate the role that literary texts, as the alternative teaching strategy to the civilization course, have on improving students’ achievement in the civilization course in learning English as a foreign language. The work is divided into two main parts. Part one, further subdivided into two chapters, covers a basic overview of the literature on the topic. The first chapter introduces the reader to a brief identification of culture and culture teaching in foreign language education, while the second chapter clarifies the importance of reading as a bridge to the target culture and the uniqueness of literary texts in constructing that bridge. Part two, brings the topic to concrete teaching situations by collecting the necessary data on the topic through an administered questionnaire and set up experimental courses with a sample population of second year students. The obtained results will finally be submitted. to further analysis and interpretation. The work, in short explores the benefits of using literary texts in the civilization course for better awareness and understanding of the target culture in teaching English as a foreign language.