Parental attitudes toward children’s cultural learning while learning German: A comparative study between Turkish and Swedish parents

Parental attitudes toward children’s cultural learning

Abstract

In today’s world, millions of people can speak more than one language. Culture plays a critical role when learning a foreign language. Whether the culture is to be added to target language teaching has been an important issue throughout teaching history. The bridge between culture and language has always been a big challenge, according to teachers and academics. During the last decades, they discussed the importance and possibilities of including culture in teaching. And in many different studies, the influence of cultural teaching on learning a new language or the thoughts of both teachers and learners on target cultural teaching have been investigated when learning a foreign language. Nevertheless, there are few studies about the parents’ impact on their children’s foreign language learning development regarding target cultural teaching. This study tries to find out what parents in Turkey (Bursa) and Sweden (Borås) think about their children’s target cultural teaching of German as a foreign language and whether there are differences between the parents’ attitudes on cultural learning in their children’s German lessons. Fifty parents from each country participate in this study, using a quantitative research design. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and an unpaired t-test with independent samples. The results showed that both groups of parents consider culture and language together, and cultural teaching should be given in their children’s German lessons. However, data analysis also demonstrated that there were significant differences between Turkish and Swedish parents regarding most attitudes. Finally, there were differences between the perceptions of both groups of parents on statements that include cultural teaching motivates their children in German classes, helps their children to speak like a native speaker, increases their cultural awareness, offers them better job opportunities and successful communication in German and cultural teaching could harm their children about own culture.

Keywords: Parental attitudes; cultural learning; foreign language; German