RAISING CULTURAL AWARENESS OF TURKISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ATTENDING EFL PREPARATORY CLASSES

Culture is the accumulation of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a group, institution or society. The relation between culture and language has long been of interest to researchers, and the common view regarding the relation between culture and language has been centered upon the intertwinement between them. Such an interest is due to the fact that being aware of target culture is of crucial significance for fruitful and successful communication. For native speakers it is not uneasy to adapt to their own culture, because they are surrounded by the society where features of the culture are noticeable in all aspects. Nevertheless, in Turkish context learners do not have a great deal of opportunities to become aware of target culture, rather it is underestimated and neglected in the course of teaching. Text books and the media are the main sources helping students become aware of target culture; hence as English language teachers we should take action with the intention of teaching cultural aspects of target language whether or not it is overtly stated in the curriculum. Therefore, this study aims at enabling university prep-class level students to become aware of target culture while they are intensively studying English in the preparatory classes so that they can both enhance their proficiency level in English and develop a sense of global harmony and peace. The participants of the study were 25 university prep class students. Observation and semi-structured interview were used as data collection tools. The findings of the study revealed that embedding culture teaching into language learning process raised students’ awareness of the significance of target culture alongside target language.