Investigating EFL Students’ and Teachers’ Attitudes towards the Use of Culturally- based Learning in Enhancing Students’ Vocabulary Retention

Abstract

The current study attempts to investigate teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards the impact of culturally-based learning on EFL students' vocabulary retention. Generally speaking, most students of English face difficulties in learning vocabulary and particularly they are unable to retain unknown words. Accordingly, This investigations aims at answering the research main question to explore students' and teachers' views about the integration of culturally-based learning into EFL classes. Consequently, two questionnaires were addressed to both teachers and students to assess the research’ validity, which would allow for the collection of quantitative descriptive data. For this reason, 92 First-Year Master students and thirteen (13) teachers from the Department of English, University of 8 Mai-Guelma, were chosen randomly. The obtained results revealed that both teachers and students strongly agreed on the influence of culturally-based learning on vocabulary retention. Hence, teachers could use some practical activities such as recycling of cultural terms to increase EFL students’ retention of vocabulary.