Enhancing EFL learners’ sociolinguistic competence through culture based activities

Abstract

This study investigates aspects of the teaching and learning of sociolinguistic competence in an EFL setting to university students from an intercultural perspective. Sociolinguistic competence refers to the learners’ ability to use appropriate target language in various social contexts. The study focuses on four main aspects of sociolinguistic competence: linguistic markers of social relations, politeness conventions, register variations, and expressions of folk wisdom. The investigation took place at the department of English- Khenchela University. Adopting a quasi- experimental -pre and post-test design-, the research is carried out in three main phases. In the pre-teaching phase, two questionnaires were conducted to explore the importance attributed to activities related to sociolinguistic competence and target language culture from both teachers and students’ perspectives. Two main results were concluded: first, although teachers stressed the fact that learners’ communicative competence should be complemented by an understanding of the target culture to enable them maintain communicative tasks with native speakers, the sociolinguistic component of communicative competence seems to be deemphasised particularly in one of its essential aspects which is stylistic variation. Second, students’ revealed a lack of exposure to English language in its authentic context; yet, they confirmed their willingness to embrace the experience of intercultural learning. During the teaching phase, sixty sevens tudents of English in their third year were randomly assigned to participate in the study. Students had a pre-test to evaluate their sociolinguistic competence prior involving them in any kind of explicit instructions related to sociolinguistic competence. Learners in the experimental group (N= 32) were exposed to explicit instruction about English native speakers’ culture, practicing role plays and exploring sociolinguistic variables affecting language use. However, learners in the control group (N=35) were taught using classroom discussions without any explicit focus on sociolinguistic competence. After the end of the teaching interventions, students in both groups had a post-test to evaluatetheir’ sociolinguistic competence. In addition to descriptive statistics, an independent-sample t-test was used for data analysis. The results indicated that students in the experimental group performed at a statistically significant level in terms of the four components. Furthermore, in the third stage of the research, findings obtained from the experimental group interview demonstrated that most learners had a positive perception on this learning experience, and become more aware of the importance of stylistic variation and appropriate language use incontexts. Students also recognized that the programme was helpful in acquiring new expressions and beneficial for developing their communicative competence.