Original Paper EFL Students’ Attitudes towards Integrating Teaching Cross-Cultural Issues and Teaching Listening Skill

Teaching cross-cultural knowledge in English teaching is drawing more and more attention nowadays. This study investigated students’ attitudes towards the integration of teaching cross-cultural issues and teaching listening skill. This study based on qualitative analysis of a questionnaire done by 30 EFL students who participated in the course on Listening 2 in the second year of their MBA program in Kien Giang University, Vietnam. During the course, besides helping students master the language and listening skill, the researcher helped cultivate their cross-cultural competence by explaining some cross-culture notes related to the content of the lesson. At the end of the course, a questionnaire has been conducted to the students to gain information about the effectiveness of integrating teaching cross-culture knowledge and teaching listening. The finding revealed that students found the cross-cultural issues effective in helping them understand the lessons better and form healthy cross-cultural awareness. They also enjoyed learning the cultural differences to develop their cross-cultural knowledge and got useful experience to widen their world.


Introduction
The purpose of learning a foreign language is to learn to communicate in the target language (Sun, 2013). For foreign language educators, to develop the learner's intercultural communication competence is to know how to teach foreign culture. Culture teaching in foreign language education is a problem countered by language teachers throughout all universities and colleges in the world.
itself is one of the elements of a culture system, and other elements of culture system must be by the language to express. As part of the language and culture as a cultural media language has the duality, determine the indivisibility of language and culture (Liang, 2014).
In addition, language is the carrier of culture. Language is a kind of media or communication tools, as the established symbol system, language is the carrier of culture, can carry all kinds of information.
Language as a cultural phenomenon, in itself has a very rich cultural connotation. The basic elements of language, vocabulary is also exist backbone of a language system, so the cultural differences in vocabulary level was the most prominent and most widely. The same words in different cultures will produce different associative meaning, such as "red" in Chinese culture festival, cheerful and lively; In English-speaking countries, it is the meaning of angry, angry.
Language is created during the long time of labor, daily life and cultural creation. It is the product of culture and also the media to form and link up cultural components (Deng & Liu, 1989). Language is very essential to culture. It is the foundation of culture, and culture couldn't exist without language.

Necessity for Culture Teaching in English Teaching
Over the last few decades, a rich understanding of the relationship between language and culture has emerged. The relationship is believed to be both interactive and mutually dependent. Language denotes culture and culture is realized through. It is through the use of language that people are able to approach and understand the intangible values, beliefs, perspectives, and thoughts that frame the culture shared by a community. When we consider language as communication, language cannot be separated from the cultural frame of reference in which communication takes place. Without cultural knowledge, it is difficult to understand the meaning of a language. It is, therefore, necessary and important to integrate cultural teaching in foreign language education.
Linguistic competence alone is not enough for learners of a language to master that language. Cultural competence is indisputably an integral part of foreign language learning (Lin, Gu, & Lu, 1990). It is goal for teachers to incorporate teaching of culture into English curriculum. Teachers should teach both www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/selt Studies in English Language Teaching Vol. 6, No. 2, 2018 100 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
language knowledge and cultural knowledge. Teaching of cultural knowledge should be combined with teaching of language points, language structure and background knowledge, etc. This could help students grasp the standard of their language and behavior during language usage and understand native speakers' thinking mode, etc. All these would encourage students to observe the cultural difference between different languages.

Contents of Culture Teaching in English Teaching
With Chen (2015), the following aspects are provided to combine culture teaching into English Culture has long been a focus of discussion by second and foreign language educators and researchers.
Over the last few decades, a rich understanding of the relationship between language and culture has emerged, which is believed to be both interactive and mutually dependent (Bush, 2007). Many countries, such as Canada, Australia, the United States of America, and some European countries, have a diverse cultural population that prompts the need for intercultural understanding and communication.
To promote mutual respect and understanding in the multicultural society, some countries have required L2 educators and curriculum planners to bring tolerance and understanding through language teaching (Larzen-Ostermark, 2008). Teaching intercultural competence is highly valued in this respect.
Teaching intercultural competence will not only satisfy the need for successful L2 acquisition, but also facilitate and support the socialization of a multicultural society and the globalizing world.

Local Vietnamese Contexts
Tran & Duong (2015) stated that teaching culture, and teaching English language skills has not been interactively introduced. ICC has been implied to play a less predominant role in Vietnamese English language teaching curriculum (Ho, 2011;Ho, 2014;Nguyen, 2013 The results showed that most respondents "sometimes" and "rarely" engage so-called ICC activities in English classroom. This partially leads to the fact that Vietnamese students of English may master English in terms of its grammar and linguistics (Nguyen, 2013), but concentrate less on intercultural communication.

The Methods and Ways to Cultivate English Cross-Cultural Consciousness
Sun ( Liang (2014) also introduced some ways to cultivate English cross-cultural consciousness such as introducing relevant cultural background knowledge, using appropriate visual image as means of culture teaching, and organizing students to participate in the activities to help students understand the culture of the English-speaking countries and experience to learn knowledge and understanding of English culture, cultural differences.
In his action research in Poland, Piaskowska (2014) used four techniques of social constructivist teaching (namely collaborative learning, situated learning, anchored instruction, and problem solving) to foster foreign language teacher' ability to teach intercultural communicative competence. The results of the study demonstrated that social constructivist techniques can be used to develop learners' ability to construct knowledge and cultural understanding in a foreign language classroom. Liddicoat and Crozet's (2001) model for intercultural language learning/teaching consists of four steps: (1) awareness raising (the stage where learners are introduced to new linguistic and cultural input); (2) experimentation (the stage to help fix learners' newly acquired knowledge via experienced learning); (3) production (the stage of applying in real-life situations and feedback); and (4) feedback (the stage of reflecting on the experience of acting like a native speaker in the production phase and allowing students to discover their place between their first language and culture and their second). Tomalin and Stempleski (1993) proposed a range of tasks such as: class discussions, research and role-plays using materials drawn from English-speaking countries that promote discussions; comparisons and reflections on English culture from various countries and the learners' own culture.
These can be arranged around subjects such as cultural symbols and products (popular images, architecture, landscapes), cultural behavior (values and attitudes, and appropriate behaviors), patterns of communication (verbal and non-verbal communication), and exploring cultural experiences (looking at learners own feelings and experiences of the target culture).
Standard activities (Corbett, 2003) to engage students actively in the target culture and language can be role plays, reading activities, listening activities, writing activities, discussion activities, and even singing. All such activities and materials should be deliberately chosen to portray different aspects of culture, highlighting attractive aspects vs. shocking ones, similarities vs. differences, facts vs. behavior, historical vs. modern, old people vs. young people, and city life vs. rural life, and so on.
Liu (2016) suggested some principles and approaches for cultivating intercultural awareness in English teaching. The principles include principle of practicality (cultural knowledge that is closely related to their daily life); principle of "step by step" (teaching should be adjusted according to students' cognitive ability and real language proficiency); principle of suitability (harmonious and organic combination of both language skills teaching and culture teaching, and principle of "student-oriented" (teachers are no longer the dominator of the class but the facilitator of the students).
Li (2016) proposed a process-oriented intercultural teaching mode for promoting students' intercultural communicative competence. It consists of three parts: experiencing cultures authentically, exploring cultures comparatively and rethinking cultures critically. In the section of experiencing cultures authentically, students are encouraged to be immersed in the natural cultural setting through the use of a variety of authentic materials. They are inspired to identify the culture issues with their own life experience based on the topics of the textbook. Experiencing cultures emphasizes the personal involvement and immersion in cultural issues of their country as well as English speaking countries.
Exploring cultures comparatively is a crucial part in helping students to present research questions after reading research-based materials and form their own independent perception. The purpose of rethinking cultures is to encourage students to break or modify the cultural stereotypes and correct or intensify their understanding of western and their own cultures after reflection and interaction based on the peer and teacher assessment.
In this study, the researcher followed this process-oriented intercultural teaching mode to help students get immersed in cross-cultural issues, explore cultures and break their cultural stereotypes because it best helps cultivate students' cross-cultural competence.

Design
A descriptive design and quantitative research method were used in this study to explore students' attitudes towards the integration of cross-cultural issues and teaching listening skill. The researchers attempt to answer two research questions as the following: -What are EFL students' attitudes towards the integration of cross-cultural issues and teaching listening skill?
-Does integrating culture in language teaching help EFL students understand the lessons better and help form healthy cross-cultural awareness?

The Participants
The sample of the study were 30 English major students, aged between 19 and 26, attending the course on Listening 2 of the Faculty of Foreign languages, Kien Giang University in Vietnam. The students' EFL competence level was identified as A1-A2 according to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).

Materials
Materials and contents should be employed in order to make learners compare and contrast foreign cultures with their own. The present study has found that the coursebook Tactics for Listening (Developing) second edition by Jack Richards, Oxford University Press, 2005.
The book provides good examples of materials/contents that provide plenty of opportunities for learners to examine other cultures and their own from a "third place" perspective.
For these lessons, culture-specific content in 10 units was utilized. Culture-relevant topics selected for discussion from the course book included city transportation, parties, eating in restaurants, invitations, small talks, hobbies and pastimes, shopping problems, movies, using telephones, city tour.

Presenting Cultural Content
The researchers based on the process-oriented intercultural teaching mode developed by Li (2016) to help students get immersed in cross-cultural issues, explore cultures and break their cultural stereotypes.
How we addressed culture can be grouped into the following: (1) In the stage of experiencing cultures, theme-related materials including videos like movie clips, quizzes were given in order to provide students with opportunity to observe and experience the authentic cultural contexts. The teachers provided cultural information about or explained the cultural point introduced in the teaching materials, or asking students to search for information about it; (2) In the second phase, the students explore the cultures and make a comparison of Vietnamese and other cultures. Students are encouraged to use different approaches to form their opinions and insights with a variety of perspectives through personal involvement and keen observation. They might find information on some websites or conduct online questionnaires or interviews with Americans; (3) In the reflection stage, students gave oral presentations in class, and the rest of students brainstormed and discussed in class. The stage of rethinking cultures was to encourage students to break or modify the cultural stereotypes and correct or intensify their understanding of other cultures and their own cultures.

Authentic text
Authentic listening texts is an efficient way for students to know about the cultural knowledge including geography, history, belief, traditions, and values. It can also help students to better understand the language they have learned. We addressed culture when a cultural point (e.g., vocabulary items that needed cultural explanation, cultural behavior or practices) appeared in their teaching materials in a specific class.
When lecturing some language materials, we could introduce some related cultural content, such as Another activity in lesson 12 (Small talk) helped students cultivate their cross-cultural awareness through authentic texts. The tasks learners to figure out the similarities and differences in small talk between western countries and in Vietnam with reference to topics and questions.

Quizzes
Quizzes might be useful for learning new information, sharing in pairs the students' existing knowledge and common sense, predicting information, and introducing differences and similarities across cultures.
Quizzes were some matching exercises to test materials that have been taught previously to get students ready for the new lesson. Here, getting the correct answer was less important than thinking about the two cultures.
We might ask the students to match each of the introduced vocabulary items with its corresponding picture or explanation printed in the materials (for example, potluck dinner, buffet, barbecue, birthday party, surprise party, etc.-unit 11). It could help the students understand the cultural knowledge better, making teaching more successful and efficient.

Guest speakers
Experts or foreign teachers were invited to give lectures on certain topics related to culture or cross-cultural communication. Inviting a guest speaker from other countries and classroom discussions could help students contrast their own cultural orientation with the cultural orientation of the invited speaker. In the class, they compared and contrasted, but were not encouraged to judge.
We sometimes invited a guest speaker to the class to talk or have a presentation about some topics related to the lesson content. For example, with the topic "City transportation" (unit 2), an American teacher brought in an interesting presentation about some common means of transportation in the U.S with the support of photos, video clips and explanations. During his presentation, students were introduced some transportation means that were uncommon in Vietnam such as subway, trams…The students were also very surprised with the information that all the taxis in New York were yellow. Then they were asked about the means of transportation in Vietnam and they could figure out the similarities and differences between the transportation means in Vietnam in the U.S.

Role-play
Role-play is another useful teaching approach that teachers can adopt. When organizing class activities, we created a certain social and cultural situation according to the teaching materials and required students to play the situation. This activity could arouse students' interests which gave them a strong willing to do their best. They tried to use the language as correctly as they could and took fully consideration of the cultural elements. In unit 11 (Invitations), the tasks focused on acquainting learners with some expressions for inviting and accepting or refusing an invitation. Students also listened to invitations on some people's voicemail. Afterwards, students were asked to do role-play activities in which they would invite their friends to watch a baseball game, go to a theatre or go for lunch, and their friends would accept or refuse the invitations using the expressions provided. Mini-dramas and short plays were also good ways to help students understand the culture as well as practice their language.

TV and movies
TV and movies via video can offer visual information that cannot be shown in books. They also can provide updated and comprehensive views of a culture. In unit 16 (Movies), students got some insights into different types of movies including western, comedy, horror, action, science fiction, romance,…through authentic films. The films helped connect learners with language and cultural issues closely. Virtual learning environments via the Internet also offered exciting possibilities for exploring each other's language and culture through ethnographic tasks across the world.

Photos/images
We also resorted photos and images as a supportive source to explain cultural notes. With the topic "Hobbies and Pastimes" (unit 13), the course book provides photos of leisure activities and suggest a task which requires learners to order the photos according to the listening text. Through photos and explanations, students were introduced some of the Americans' interests including skiing, hiking, bird watching, playing baseball, gardening, playing in a band, collecting things…This could arouse students' interest in culture learning and the information was also very useful for the listening multiple choice and ordering exercises in the lesson.

Group/pair work discussion
In the discussion the students also seemed to have understood that cultural narrow-mindedness is not unique to any culture but presents in all cultures. Furthermore, the discussion changed the focus from "changing" one's behavior to "understanding" the behavior of others and then determining what needs to be done so that both sides work together. This experience helped my students in recognizing stereotyping and the results of looking at others through one's own cultural lens. It is easier to recognize such behaviors in someone from another culture than in oneself; thus, this activity for my classes was a real breakthrough.
In addition, students can be asked to make a presentation in the class, showing cultural differences to a certain topic. Sometimes we addressed culture when a cultural issue emerged in the classroom. That is, we had assigned homework for the students to work in groups and prepare to talk about a topic (such as talking about restaurants in one of these countries: Thailand, Japan, Mexico, China, Korea, Vietnam-unit 5), and on the day of observations, we asked the students to have group presentation and then elicited comments from the rest of the class then asked them to compare restaurants of many countries in the world. Through photos and explanation in group presentations, students could know some ethnic foods such as burger, pizza, spaghetti, fries and the custom or leaving tips at restaurants.
This helped them a lot when they do the multiple choice and matching exercises later in the unit.

Comparison
Other activities were individual presentations about cultural differences between the western countries and Vietnam in terms of things to do at parties, the use of telephones, topics in a small talk, eating habits considered to be rude, how to behave during dinner in someone's family, tables manners, and etiquette for visitors (units 11, 12, 18). Comparison is an important way in developing intercultural awareness in English teaching. It could help students get a clearer understanding about the differences between two different cultures and be able to develop their cultural sensitivity so that they could make proper and appropriate intercultural communication in the future.

Instruments: The Questionnaire
Satisfaction questionnaire was implemented at the end of the semester and distributed to all the participants. The four scales of the questionnaire were set as 1-Strongly Disagree; 2-Disagree; 3-Agree; 4-Strongly Agree.
The main focus of the questionnaire was to obtain how the students think about the cross-cultural competence teaching they were engaged in and how it influenced their English learning.

Research Results and Discussion
The questionnaire helped collect information about students' attitudes towards the implementation of the integration of teaching cross-culture issues in teaching listening skills as well as to evaluate the benefits of what they had learned through the lessons.  claimed that they were more confident with their cross-cultural communication ability and the majority of the students (86.7%) reported that the Program helped them form healthy cross-cultural awareness.
In general, the students had positive thinking about the applictaion of the integration program. For all the five items, in the column "Agree and Strongly Agree", the average number showed that 76.9% of the ideas agreed with the benefits of integrating cross-cultural in listening skill teaching.
The data collected from all items of the questionnaire were subjected to SPSS Program for reliability coefficient. The result showed that the questionnaire on students' attitudes towards the cultural-language skill integration was reliable. The reliability coefficient and the standard deviation were α = .83, SD = 3.23 as seen in Table 2 below. The data were also subjected to SPSS Program for the mean scores of all students' attitudes towards the integration program. The results were presented in Table 3. Valid N (listwise) 30 As presented in Table 3, the descriptive statistics showed that the mean scores of the questionnaire and the standard deviation were M = 3.01, SD = .65. This revealed that the students had a fairly good attitude about the integration program (the mean score was higher than scale 3).
As presented in the previous part, the four scales of the questionnaire were set as 1-Strongly Disagree; 2-Disagree; 3-Agree; 4-Strongly Agree, and Table 3 showed that the mean scores of the questionnaire were 3.01. This number was between the range of scale 3 (Agree) and scale 4 (Strongly agree), and it was a little higher than scale 3. Therefore, another test was also run to compare this mean score with the scale 3.
A one-sample t-test was performed to check whether mean scores of the questionnaire (M = 3.01) was significantly different from scale 3 or not. The results were shown in Table 4. The results from Table 4 indicated that the mean scores of the questionnaire M = 3.01 (SD = .65) was the same with 3 (t(30) = .11, df = 29, p = .91). This meant that students' attitudes towards the integration program is the same as the scale 3 (Agree). The results, therefore, supported the conclusion that most of the students had fairly good attitudes towards the integration of cross-cultural knowledge and teaching listening skill.
In conclusion, the findings from the questionnaire on students' attitudes towards the culture-language integration revealed that in general, the participants had positive thinking about the program. For all the five items, over 50% of the ideas agreed with the benefits of the instruction. The reliability coefficient and the standard deviation were also proved reliable (α = .83, SD = 3.23). The statistics showed that the mean scores of the questionnaire and the standard deviation were M = 3.01, SD = .65. A one-sample t-test indicated that the mean score of the questionnaire (M = 3.01, SD = .65) was the same as the scale 3 (Agree) (t(30) = .11, df = 29, p = .91). The results concluded that most of the participants had fairly good attitude towards the integration of culture and English skills.
The discussions will focus on some suggestions in teaching listening skill in particular and English skills in general, specifically training students' skills to deal with cross-cultural issues and form healthy cross-cultural awareness.
Firstly, In the classrooms, students should be encouraged to resort the cross-cultural issues to help them understand the lessons better. They need to realize the importance of cross-cultural knowledge and have a habit to learn about cultural differences to form healthy cross-cultural awareness and get useful experience to widen their world.
Secondly, there should be more textbooks designed in accompany with cultural boxes or cross-cultural notes to help students and teachers more aware of the cultural differences and make use of them in their learning and teaching process.
Thirdly, foreign language educators should be developed their cross-cultural competence and know how to teach foreign culture. This will enable to bridge the gap between English teachers' perceptions and practices on promoting cross-cultural competence in foreign language classrooms.

Conclusion
The purpose of learning a foreign language is to learn to communicate in the target language, to learn the customs and traditions of the speech community, and to promote one's study and work. Culture must be fully incorporated as a vital component of language. Culture teaching plays an important role in fulfilling the goal of cultivating the cross-cultural communication abilities and aiding learning.
The close interaction of language and culture justifies the cultivation of cultural awareness in foreign language teaching as well as challenges the traditional teaching approach centered on the teaching of linguistic knowledge. The teaching of culture knowledge will undeniably promote communicative ways and methods. However, culture teaching in foreign language education is a problem countered by language teachers throughout all universities and colleges in the world. The development and improvement of such competence needs efficient and scientific teaching approach.
The research was designed with the purpose to emphasize that English teaching should enable students to function effectively in another language and understand cultural context, including day-to-day conventions, giving or receiving presents, paying visits, etc. Teachers should identify the relationship between culture teaching and language teaching and realize the key culture items in English. They also should try to find out more useful strategies for culture teaching in the process of English teaching and make use of these different methods to assist their teaching.