- Title
- The representations of life outside Vietnam in first-year technical university textbooks in Hanoi and their influence on students’ intercultural communicative competence in English learning
- Creator
- Lam, Thi Lan Huong
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks are an indispensable component in language classrooms to transport cultural elements, societal values, and attitudes as well as language knowledge, to support the process of foreign language acquisition (Rajabi & Ketabi, 2012). Designed for the purpose of international use, these commercial ELT textbooks expose learners to foreign perspectives embedded in cultural representations. In many Southeast Asian countries where English is spoken as a foreign language, ELT textbooks are the predominant source of language and culture that learners are exposed to. In Vietnamese non-major universities, commercial ELT textbooks are sometimes the only source of language input, which to some extent, offer undeniable and remarkable advantages in providing the context of lessons and classroom practice (Nguyen, 2011). Important as they may be, little is known about ELT textbook choice, and foreign cultural representations in these ELT textbooks in Vietnamese tertiary education. This study examines the current textbook use in ten technical universities in Hanoi, which are the representatives of non-major universities in Vietnam. This study not only focuses on the representations of culture as life outside Vietnam in these ELT textbooks but also investigates how these cultural differences influence students’ development of intercultural communicative competence in language learning. The study was conducted in three phases: phase one (administrator interviews and textbook collection), phase two (textbook analysis) and phase three (teachers and students’ interviews). In phase one, structured interviews with Heads/Vice Heads of Language Faculties identified a corpus of similar and different current ELT textbooks and the context in which these textbooks were used. Phase two focused on the cultural representations of life outside Vietnam in these textbooks, applying a sources of culture model (Cortazzi & Jin, 1999), and senses of culture framework (Adaskou et al., 1990). The findings demonstrate a predominance of foreign cultural representations, with strong focus on British-American and European cultures, and an underrepresentation of the source culture (Vietnamese culture in this context) and many different international cultures. Phase two also discovered a similar pattern to these textbooks emphasising the sociological and aesthetic sense of culture, with less emphasis on the semantic and pragmatic senses. In phase three, semi-structured interviews with teachers and students were conducted to explore how students and teachers perceived and responded to these representations in their learning and teaching activities. The data analysis in this phase observed a strong agreement of teachers and students on the patterns of cultural representations in these textbooks. This phase also identified multiple teachers and students’ views of the influence of cultural representations on students’ intercultural communicative competence and their cultural teaching pedagogies. The research has revealed four key issues: The issues arising from the current provisions of technical university English Foreign Language (EFL) programs and the course objectives toward students’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC); the issues arising from the representations of life outside Vietnam embedded in Vietnamese technical university textbooks and the development of students’ ICC; the issues arising from Vietnamese technical university students’ learning interests and their development of ICC; and the issues arising from Vietnamese technical university EFL teachers’ cultural teaching practices and the development of students’ ICC. From the four discussions, I propose recommendations to improve technical university students’ ICC. These recommendations include the course provisions, the cultural content and culture-based activities that may be applied to technical university contexts to develop students’ understanding of cultural differences and their ICC.
- Subject
- English textbooks; ICC development; cultural representatations; foreign cultures; cultural difference; intercultural English teaching; intercultural English learning; technical university students
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1355499
- Identifier
- uon:31476
- Rights
- Copyright 2018 Thi Lan Huong Lam
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 4 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 139 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |