Intercultural sensitivity and its effects on ELT curricula – Teacher insights

Purpose – This qualitative research set out to understand what teachers ’ assessments were of the context of teaching as it relates to the curriculum, and what they consider appropriate for an optimal teaching and learning experience in a university English language teaching (ELT) context. Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative data were deemed required to understand the effects and understanding teachers had of the ELT curriculum as it played out in their teaching context. Focus group interviews and observations were the main method for data generation. Findings – The context has a bearing on the ongoing development of teachers ’ intercultural sensitivity (IS) frames and how they address IS over time in their context of teaching as it pertains to curriculum. Originality/value – This is an original research paper which gives insight to knowledge about the relationship between ELT, curriculum and culture. business, engineering and economics to service the various petrochemical and other sectors in the city. English was the medium of instruction in the university and most English courses were for the preparatory year students which were general English courses based on a number of British and American books such as Interchange and Headway which were replete with western culture. Students were given 20 instructional hours per week, five of which were computer based provided by the Rosetta Stone software. The case study included a total of 19 expatriate teachers (13 males and 6 females) from various countries (Jordan, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Sudan, UK, and USA) who were given pseudonyms in the analysis to reflect their culture. Teachers were divided into three groups (2 males and 1 female) and invited to participate in three separate audio recorded focus group interviews on campus. The questions mainly centred around teachers experience in the Saudi ELT setting, the factors that affect their IS, and the way they construct IS within their own classes and unique set of students. As noted above, these were supplemented by follow-up audio recorded interviews (6 in total), video recordings (30 lessons in total of 50 min duration of 4 participants) and diary entries (26 in total both email and written) of their experiences. All interviews as well as video recordings were transcribed and diary entries digitised and imported into NVivo for sorting and clustering into themes. Initially, 55 themes were identified and after further analysis, these were reduced to 16 themes that fell into 4 clusters. One of these clusters was curriculum for which the following analysis is based. narrow ideas. up the to them. We are teachers. That is what we are for. Give us toolssothat wecanteach.Itdoesnot to bethe wholeInternet. You or five websites cultural seal of then let us do let see the – Safia). You could have a culture week in the class if it is related to one of the topics in the book or you could just do it the first week of the semester where you spend one week just studying different cultures and then at the end of the week do some role-plays. Give them some courage and let two students work together in pairs in a situation. Say you are both Chinese now or one is Chinese and one is Swedish or something like this. You give them a situation and knowing what you know about that culture, how would that person react in that situation and let them do some role-plays in class (FGC – Safia). we are not just simply . teachers . we are the[ir] guides. I have to tell them what ’ s right or wrong. We have to exploit the particular text in the best possible manner. That ’ s essential (FGA – Maheer).