ABSTRACT
This qualitative-phenomenological study was conducted to find out the teachers’ strategies and experiences in integrating culture into English teaching among six (6) Junior High School teachers as bases for training workshops. The result revealed that the teachers’ strategies were: using authentic materials; integrating local culture in teaching vocabulary, grammar, and reading; and using multimedia apps and materials. The experiences of the teachers were: successful conduct of English lessons, improved language skills of learners, cross cultural understanding, lessons becoming meaningful and attractive, and language becoming relatable to learners. The challenges were: limited resources and learning materials, balancing cultural integration with language instruction, learners’ resistance or lack of interest, presence of slow learners and non-readers and slow internet connectivity. Teachers overcome the challenges through respecting learners’ diverse backgrounds; balanced teaching of local and foreign culture; collaborating with colleagues; being flexible, resilient, and open-minded; and using a variety of reading material.
Keywords: Teachers’ Strategies, Cultural Integration, Language Teaching
INTRODUCTION
Background of the Study
Cultural integration in English language teaching has grown as classrooms throughout the world become more varied and connected. Teaching language skills is simply one aspect of effective language instruction; another is having awareness of the cultural settings that affect communication. A more comprehensive learning process is promoted by the inclusion of culture in language instruction, which also improves language acquisition (Byram, 2022).
With millions of learners striving to become fluent in this worldwide language, learning English has become a global phenomenon. One of the key factors influencing learning English is culture. For many years, a variety of research fields have examined one of the most significant and comprehensive subjects: culture. Different definitions of the idea have been offered by academics from different fields. But according to Spencer-Oatey and Kádár (2020), it is a difficult undertaking because different fields have different definitions for it. Culture, according to Spencer-Oatey, H., & Kádár, D. Z. (2020),, is "... a hazy mix of attitudes, beliefs, behavioral norms, fundamental beliefs, and common values that shape a community and impact each individual's actions and perceptions of the 'meaning’ of the actions of others". Thus, the English teaching community generally accepts that culture plays an important part in learning a language.
This can be achieved by means of culture integration in the curriculum. In English, there are several teaching strategies that the teacher uses in cultural integration. In line with this, the Department of Education has implemented integration of local culture into English instruction. It has become a new trend in the current curriculum where culture is crucial to helping students become more proficient communicators. The ability to see, explain, and act appropriately in accordance with the culture associated with a language is a prerequisite for communicating in that language, so linguistic competency and culture are closely and dynamically related. Thus, culture must be the primary focus of language training in order for learners to be able to communicate as much as feasible. If the main goal of communicative language training is to provide learners with meaningful interactions in authentic situations with native or nearly native speakers of the target language, then teaching about culture is crucial. This will enable students to achieve their communicative needs.
In the past, it was believed that culture and language education seemed to be two different worlds distinctly apart from each other. But studies have revealed that integrating culture into language instruction resulted in increased performance among students. This is so, because learning language structures becomes easy and natural as the students enjoy the stories about local beliefs, values, artifacts, folktales, songs, lives of heroes, and everyday happenings which they experience everyday. In this case, comprehension becomes easy and language structures are learned unconsciously and naturally (Byram, 2022).
It was for these reasons that the researcher examined the cultural integration used by the teachers teaching English in order to find out the strategies used and its importance in English instruction.
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