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An Evaluation of the Place of Culture in English Education in Tunisia

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Book cover Evaluation in Foreign Language Education in the Middle East and North Africa

Part of the book series: Second Language Learning and Teaching ((SLLT))

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Abstract

This study, situated within cultural content evaluation and analysis research, uses the content analysis technique to investigate the cultural dimension of English education in a Muslim EFL setting, namely Tunisia. It specifically scrutinizes the place of culture in official curricular documents and locally-produced teaching materials. The materials analyzed and evaluated, in this study, are two official curricular documents as well as eight textbooks and seven teacher guides used in Tunisian basic and high schools. The study revealed that, unlike in many other Muslim EFL settings, Tunisian curriculum designers and textbook writers do not have any a priori ideological objection to the inclusion of culture in the English program. However, they seem to approach the cultural dimension of L2 education in a nonsystematic, unprincipled way. The study informed also that there exists a “latent cultural curriculum” that is subservient to the presentation of the structural and functional aspects of language. Such latent cultural content is hypothesized to only lead to a basic form of factual cultural knowledge as students are never engaged in intra-cultural or intercultural dialogic, interpretive experiences. The implication of this study is that although culture is present in L2 education by choice or by coercion, the treatment of cultural content remains a function of two variables, namely (1) the philosophical and ideological foundations of language curricula and (2) the distance between the culture(s) representing the source language and that/those representing the target one.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia

    Tarek Hermessi

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  1. Tarek Hermessi
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Correspondence to Tarek Hermessi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. English Language Institute, University of Jeddah , Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

    Sahbi Hidri

  2. Higher Colleges of Technology , Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Christine Coombe

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Hermessi, T. (2017). An Evaluation of the Place of Culture in English Education in Tunisia. In: Hidri, S., Coombe, C. (eds) Evaluation in Foreign Language Education in the Middle East and North Africa. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43234-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43234-2_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-43233-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-43234-2

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