Perceived Benefits of Conscious Engagement with Culture: An Analysis of Pre-Service Teachers’ Interviews and Reflections in Their Freshman Year

The importance of going beyond setting cognitive and linguistic aims in English language education is well-documented, for extending the scope of instruction to incorporate (inter)cultural awareness, sensitivity, and competence is of utmost importance for keeping pace with the globalised world. Future teachers of English as a foreign language in Turkey are expected to address culture in their instruction. However, living in a dominantly monolingual/monocultural context and lacking authentic encounters, they may fail to have a true understanding of culture, lack meta-cognitive awareness of the term, and may have ethnocentric tendencies. Furthermore, the low number of culture-related prescribed and elective courses during pre-service training may worsen the situation, thereby creating the need for teacher educators to assign pre-service teachers culture-themed tasks to offer cultural learning and experiences opportunities. This study, therefore, is an attempt to uncover the possible outcomes of creating a monocultural and/or cross-cultural space where the related parties deliberately talked about culture. The researcher was also motivated to conduct an informal environment, i.e., situation, analysis to find out their understanding of culture and references to cultural aspects to devise the culture-related elective she would offer those students as sophomores the following year. 42 freshmen in a Turkish university’s English language teacher education program were asked to consciously talk about culture with proficient native and/or non-native English users in face-to-face or online interviews. While 22 freshmen conducted culture-themed interviews with proficient Turkish English users who had abroad experience, 20 had first-hand intercultural interactions in diverse online environments. Content analysis of both their interview transcripts and reflections showed that the process contributed to their observation skills, expanded their (inter)cultural knowledge, improved their open attitudes towards differences, increased their self-confidence, offered them opportunity for fun though the process was not without its challenges, and their understanding of culture could not go beyond a touristic perspective. In the end, pedagogical insights are offered to help teacher educators to make informed decisions to increase (inter)cultural awareness during pre-service teacher training.