Experiences and perspectives of in - Service teachers of english at lower secondary schools towards the practice of culture teaching in English language classrooms

EXPERIENCES AND PERSPECTIVES OF IN-SERVICE TEACHERS OF 
ENGLISH AT LOWER SECONDARY SCHOOLS TOWARDS THE 
PRACTICE OF CULTURE TEACHING IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE 
CLASSROOMS 
Vu Thi Hoang Mai*, Nguyen Dieu Hong 
University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University 
Received: 05/09/2018; Revised: 25/09/2018; Accepted: 20/08/2019 
Abstract: This paper looks into the experiences and perspectives of teachers of English at lower 
secondary schools towards the practice of teaching culture in their classrooms. Data were collected 
quantitatively and qualitatively through semi-open questionnaires and group interviews with 45 teachers 
of lower secondary schools in a city in the north of Vietnam. It was primarily discovered that, although 
most of the informants had many years of teaching experience, and the conditions for teaching cultural 
contents in their classes were believed to be rather favorable, these teachers found it hard for them to 
actually implement culture teaching due to the lack of skills at exploring cultural contents in textbooks 
and conducting suitable in-class activities. Recommendations are made regarding professional 
development programs for in-service teachers of English at secondary schools in Vietnam in the future. 
Key words: In-service teacher perceptions, culture teaching, teaching cultural contents, ELT, secondary 
education 
1. Introduction 
 The National Foreign Language Project 2020 of Vietnam is coming close to the promised deadline 
with huge achievements in the reformation and promotion of standardized teaching and learning of 
languages, especially English. One of the hundreds of significant projects was the introduction of the 10-
year English textbook series into the modified national curriculum in 2012 under three official decisions of 
the Ministry of Education and Training (hereafter referred as MOET). Being used simultaneously with the 
7-year series, the 10-year series is supposed to help Vietnamese students of general education to acquire 
both proficient communicative language skills and cultural knowledge of the world and Vietnam, as well 
as a positive attitude towards global and local cultures (MOET, 2018). Although the importance of culture 
teaching has been largely assumed in the language classroom, a nation-wide survey on more than 3700 
Vietnamese teachers of English conducted by University of Languages and International Studies in 2015 
for a government-sponsored project showed that knowledge of and ability to teach culture and use that to 
build empathy was the second most prioritized content in these teachers’ demand regarding in-service 
training programs. Yet, there has been no reported training course specifically on culture teaching in 
addition to language proficiency promotion or general pedagogical skills. That is why it seems advisory 
that these teachers’ experiences and perceptions of culture teaching be investigated. 
 Culture teaching in the English language classroom has been among the most frequently scrutinized 
issues in the last 40 years over the globe. In the recent international literature in general, the discussion of 
this issue has revolved around tertiary instructors and students of English, rather than the concerned in 
secondary education, such as in Al-Amir (2017), DeCoursey (2012), Li (2016), Liu and Fang (2017), Phan 
and Locke (2016), Tseng and Chao (2012), Vo (2014), Yilmaz (2016), and many more. In another fashion, 
* Email: hoangmai2308@gmail.com 
other researchers like Godley (2012), Lefstein and Snell (2011), Norton (2013), Petraki and Nguyen (2016) 
look into culture teaching through a certain cultural aspect or product such as discourse genres, popular 
culture or a subject in a content-based English curriculum. In Vietnam particularly, a few studies have also 
tapped on the representations of culture in the national curriculum and curricular textbooks of general 
education and proposed some theoretical frameworks for cultural contents analysis (Dinh, 2012, 2014, 
2016). What has not been seen is a rich literature body into what Vietnamese teachers have perceived of 
culture teaching in the language classroom apart from how important culture is. Also, what has not been 
examined thoroughly ever is what our teachers of English in general education levels have done in their 
classrooms to bring culture into an English lesson. 
 Inspired by this niche in research, this current study aims to answer two questions: 
1. What do lower secondary teachers of English in Vietnam think about culture teaching in terms of the 
role of culture, the feasibility of culture teaching, the cultural contents in textbooks and the ultimate 
objectives of culture teaching in the English language classroom? 
2. What strategies have these teachers used to teach culture, entailing their methods to analyze cultural 
contents, learning skills to focus and specific activities to be applied? 
2. Theoretical framework 
 In order to answer the research questions, this study looks at the literature of perspectives towards 
culture teaching and the available approaches to teaching cultural contents as well as analysis of learning 
materials in the English language classroom. 
2.1. Perspectives towards culture in language teaching 
 Research into perspectives towards culture in language teaching and learning started as early as in the 
1950s and have proposed abundance of philosophy systems. Before the 2000s, culture teaching in foreign 
language education underwent such approaches like the conventional perspective, the systemic functional 
linguistics perspective, the practical perspective, the postmodernist perspective and the sociocultural perspective 
(Jebahi, 2013). These theories, on the one hand, approved of the importance of culture in the acquisition of a 
second language, and on the other hand, either viewed culture as a set of homogeneous, fixed and consistent 
systems separable from language or promoted imperialism in language teaching and learning (Jebahi, 2013). 
 Since 2000, the world has been in the search for the reasons why foreign and second language 
education was not successful in outer and expanding circles despite the advent of communicative language 
teaching. Answers to the questions have led the literature to a number of new paradigms and frameworks 
of teaching language such as teaching English as an international language which considers the functions 
of English in intercultural settings (Matsuda 2009, Sharifian 2009, as cited in Dinh 2016), intercultural 
communicative competence presented by Byram (1997, 2008), multidialectal competence (Canagarajah, 
2006), and metacultural competence (Sharifian, 2013). Although differing in elaboration of taxonomies, 
these approaches share an encouragement of local and contextual needs of learners, a promotion of the 
legitimacy of language varieties, and an emphasis on the dynamic, heterogeneous and contradictory of 
culture. According to these perspectives and frameworks, teaching macro skills like speaking and writing 
or micro skills like pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary should not only focus on the inner circle’s norms, 
which helps avoid learners’ identity conflict (Dinh, 2016). Accordingly, teaching and learning materials of 
foreign language not only represent “different pronunciation features, but rather a much more encompassing 
manifestation of cultural, linguistics and other values.” (Matsuda &Friedrick, 2012, as cited in Dinh, 2016). 
2.2. Approaches to teaching cultural contents in the language classroom 
 In congruence with the pre-2000 period’s perspectives towards culture teaching, two primary ways 
to handle culture in language education were promoted, namely teaching culture as content and teaching 
language and culture. In Zhu Hua (2014), the former approach advocates the explicit exploration of culture 
through a cross-cultural view, focusing on the 4Fs taxonomy (i.e., food, fairs, folklore, facts) proposed by 
Kramsch (1991), or Big C (i.e., the study of history, literary products, fine arts) and small c (i.e., features 
of daily life) by Brook (1960), or cultural core elements and themes by Nostrand (1967, 1974). This 
approach came up with four main teaching techniques as follows: 
 - Culture capsule focuses on explicit discussion of cultural differences 
 - Culture assimilators involve scenario-based questions and answers 
 - Culture island engages culture-based classroom decoration 
 - Drama encourages miscommunication interpretation and repair 
 Unlike the teaching culture-as-content approach which considers culture as another dimension of 
language learning and being separable from language, teaching language and culture approach calls for an 
integrated methodology to language and culture in language teaching and learning. Accordingly, 
perspectives on what is to be integrated and how to integrate it, as well as different teaching methods and 
techniques are considered (Zhu Hua, 2014). For example, it is recommended that the learner’s native culture 
and language should be integrated into language and culture learning. The procedure of integration includes 
a needs analysis and discussion between target and native cultures. Another proposal is to integrate culture 
at all levels of language teaching. Following this perspective, the knowledge of how to use and interpret a 
language in a context-sensitive and culturally appropriate way is essential to successful communication. 
Therefore, it is necessary to teach culture together with language, not culture as supplementary. It is 
necessary to develop new materials which introduce the target culture and at the same time encourage 
students to reflect on their own culture. Revising teacher training pedagogies based on the integrated 
language and culture teaching approach is also needed. Lastly, this integrated approach also calls for the 
need to make cultural awareness an essential and integrated component of communicative competence. In 
this sense, culture is placed at central stage in language and culture pedagogy. 
 Both the teaching culture-as-content and the integrated language-and-culture approaches promote 
native-like performance of language learners while they do not place emphasis on the learners’ own 
linguistic and cultural background. Meanwhile, many researchers believe that with an intercultural 
approach of teaching culture through language, the goal of language learning is not simply to develop 
excellent linguistic skills or a lot of cultural information, but to help the learner become an intercultural 
speaker who can shuttle between different cultures and different viewpoints (Zhu Hua, 2014). Accordingly, 
the objective of language and culture teaching and learning is to mitigate the target culture’s norms and 
promote one’s native culture. Learners are provided with platforms where their own and other cultures 
communicate with each other, whereby learners can expose to diverse perspectives and express their own, 
accommodate themselves to the communication context and develop empathy for others. Simultaneously, 
language is taught in parallel with the patterns of thoughts or thematic contents of the current lesson. 
 Apparently, the abovementioned approaches differ in the degree of importance attached to culture, 
in the ultimate goal of language learning and in how language and culture related to each other in language 
teaching and learning. On the contrary, all three approaches have their advantages that can benefit language 
teaching practices. The selection of one approach or the combination of different techniques depends on 
the specific lesson, the favorable conditions of teaching and learning, and the culture of learning in the 
particular classroom. 
3. Methods 
 The current study was conducted in a mixed approach in which the data were collected quantitatively 
and qualitatively. Forty-five teachers of English at lower secondary schools in a city in the North of Vietnam 
participated in answering a questionnaire and two group interviews in the summer of 2018. Forty-four of 
these teachers, who have acquired an English proficiency equal to B2 level in the CEFR, have more than 
ten years of teaching experience at lower secondary schools. They have to strictly follow the national 
curriculum and syllabi for each grade, and are dependent on the unified teaching materials passed by the 
MOET. 
 The questionnaire consisted of two main contents, namely the teachers’ perspectives towards culture 
teaching in the English language classroom, and what they have done to bring cultural contents into their 
lessons. There were nine questions dealing with these teachers’ opinions about the importance of culture 
teaching, the feasibility of culture teaching in their context, their preferences for which cultures to teach, 
the objectives of culture teaching, and the role of theories in the application of culture into teaching a foreign 
language. The other eight questions addressed the participants’ experiences in their culture teaching 
practice, including teaching topics, focused skills in class, the methods for analyzing cultural contents in 
the textbooks and the specific activities conducted for culture teaching. 
 Two group interviews focused on the participants’ clarification of their answers to the questions in 
the questionnaire. Through the interview, data about the factors that affect the possibility and effectiveness 
of in-class culture teaching and the methods these teachers have applied to conduct culture teaching were 
revealed, using content analysis. 
4. Findings 
4.1. Teachers’ perspectives towards culture teaching 
 In terms of the importance and feasibility of teaching culture in ELT, there is a big difference between 
the level of importance that teachers place on teaching cultural contents and the feasibility of this aspect in 
their opinions. While all teachers acknowledge the importance of teaching culture in English language 
teaching, nearly 54% of the teachers doubt the feasibility of cultural content integration, considering this 
“infeasible”. To explain for their choices, the teacher participants attribute the degree of feasibility to 
different factors such as time allocation, students’ language competence and cognitive level, teachers’ 
culture teaching competence, curricular materials, policies and so on. 
Table 1. Factors that make integrating cultural contents into ELT feasible at secondary schools 
Adequate time allotment 13.3% 
Students’ sufficient language proficiency & cultural cognition 8.9% 
Adequate training of culture teaching for teachers 26.7% 
Recognizable cultural contents in curricular materials 66.7% 
School authorities’ encouragement of culture teaching 31.1% 
Teachers’ sufficient cultural knowledge & experience 31.1% 
Others 15.6% 
Table 2. Factors that make integrating cultural contents into ELT infeasible at secondary schools 
Inadequate time allotment 31.1% 
Students’ insufficient language proficiency & cultural cognition 40.0% 
No training of culture teaching for teachers 31.1% 
Unrecognizable cultural contents in curricular materials 17.8% 
School authorities’ lack of encouragement of culture teaching 8.9% 
Teachers’ lack of confidence in cultural knowledge & experience 11.1% 
Others 8.9% 
 Tables 1 and Table 2 describe the factors making integrating cultural contents into ELT feasible or 
infeasible at secondary schools. Among the factors that make the integration feasible, explicit cultural 
contents in the textbooks currently in use, the school authorities’ encouraging policies of culture teaching, 
and teachers’ sufficient cultural knowledge and experience are the top three factors. Qualitatively, some 
other factors mentioned by the respondents include students’ interest in exploring cultures and their needs 
for learning about familiar cultural contents to enrich their knowledge. Meanwhile, students’ insufficient 
language proficiency and cultural cognition to acquire new knowledge, teachers having not been trained to 
teach culture and inadequate time allotment in class are mentioned as the three biggest barriers to integrating 
cultural contents into ELT. Interestingly, the follow-up interviews also reveal that one main reason that 
leads to teachers’ lack of time for culture teaching is the seemingly too demanding requirements of the 
officers from the education divisions of the city or districts, which does not seem to promote the teaching 
of culture. Three teachers from the same school respond: 
 “We are asked to conduct pre- and while- and post- activities for every text and skill. But the number of activities 
and inputs in the book is already too many to handle. And we have to guarantee that every lesson uses 
technology, whereas the projector sometimes breaks down and it takes so much time to prepare the machine.” 
 Regarding the cultural contents of the curricular textbooks, the qualitative results reflect positive 
perceptions of the cultural inputs in the 10-year textbook series of 25 informants who have one to five years of 
experience of teaching this series. They report the cultural contents in these textbooks are abundant, updated, 
useful, based on various cultures and explicitly represented. However, the same teachers also maintain that the 
included vocabulary amount is too much, and the topics are not relevant to students in remote areas. 
 The participant teachers place great emphasis on the need to introduce Vietnamese culture and 
cultures of countries speaking English as the official language in the English textbook and English 
curriculum at secondary level (88.9% and 84.4% of respondents respectively). Information about cultures 
of South East Asian countries, cultures of Asian countries and cultures of countries using English as the 
first language receive less attention from the teachers (66.7%). As a result, nearly 60% of participants think 
that information on the above-mentioned cultures should be introduced unequally in the textbook. Reponses 
from the follow-up interviews reveal that Vietnamese culture should be most focused when integrating 
cultural contents into ELT. 
Table 3. Purposes of teaching culture in ELT classrooms at secondary schools 
Improve students’ language skills 57.8% 
Encourage students to learn a foreign language 57.8% 
Improve students’ knowledge about the world 100.0% 
Provide a multi-perspective approach in problem-solving skills in communication 80.0% 
Build up & promote Vietnamese cultural identity 80.0% 
Other purposes 0.0% 
 According to the participants, teaching culture in ELT classrooms serves various purposes; however, the 
primary purpose is to improve students’ knowledge about the world (100%). Building up and promoting the 
Vietnamese cultural identity and providing a multi-perspective approach in problem-solving skills in 
communication rank second with 80% of responses. 
4.2. Teachers’ practice of culture teaching 
 The participants have different priorities in selecting topics to teach cultural contents. Family, 
festivals, customs and traditions, and education are the most widely chosen, while science and technology, 
press and media as well as law are among the least likely selected topics. The main reason for not choosing 
certain topics to teach culture is that teachers do not know how to explore and integrate such contents in 
their class. Some teachers inform in the interviews that some topics in the curricular textbooks require broad 
background knowledge which does not seem to meet the communicative needs of lower secondary school 
students. 
Table 4. Topics in English textbooks usually selected to teach cultural contents 
Family