DISCUSSION OF SOCIO-CULTURAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO OMANI LEARNERS

There is a growing focus on the role that socio-cultural and psychological factors play in second/foreign language achievement (Gardner & McIntyre, 1993: Gardner & Trebly, 1955). The purpose of this study is to identify the socio- cultural and psychological factors of the EFL learners and how they respond to the target language culture. The challenges the teachers usually face in an EFL classroom are lack of motivation among students to language learning mainly in the productive skills: speaking and writing. Students hesitate to converse in English, and fail to write sentences with appropriate syntax as they lack schematic knowledge which is socially acquired and depends on the learner’s culture and the native language culture. Teachers have no effective instructional strategies to overcome the problems, as they lack awareness of the learners’ culture and ways to align this lack of awareness with the target language culture and the learning styles of their learners. This paper explores the cultural and psychological factors of the EFL learners with special reference to Omani learners and their impact on target language acquisition. This paper presents how the teaching resources and teaching practices could be adapted to align the target language culture with the cultural background of the learners.