Exploring the Cultural Awareness amongst Beninese Post-Beginner Learners of English as a Foreign Language in the Littoral Secondary Schools

Teaching a Foreign language also involves transmitting knowledge about the target culture or the country in which the language is spoken. This study aimed at investigating on the place culture in English as Foreign Language classrooms at secondary schools level in Benin context and the post-beginner learners’ cultural awareness in relation to successful communicative performance and language proficiency development. With that aim, a cultural awareness test was administered to three hundred and sixty participants selected randomly at the rate of thirty-six per school from ten secondary schools of the Littoral region of Benin. Two hundred and sixty valid answers were then collected and analyzed quantitatively using Microsoft Excel 2007. The results revealed that many teachers seem to underestimate the importance of culture, which explains a gap between their perceptions and practices in dealing with culture. Consequently, Beninese learners did not acquire cultural awareness. Indeed, EFL teaching in Benin may have missed the focus on cultural aspects of the foreign language and thereby explains learners’ failure to achieve successful intercultural communication. Some respondents also viewed comparing aspects of the students’ own culture with those of the target culture as the commonest way of developing cultural awareness. Moreover, shortage of time was seen as the main obstacle for teaching culture in classrooms. Students do not recognize the cultural aspect of the language despite their close relationship, which was proved in the dual and simultaneous improvement of advanced students’ performance in linguistics, and cultural knowledge, which, in turn, engenders their lack of cultural awareness being a key element in language proficiency and intercultural communicative competence. This research paper comes up with the recommendations that school www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/selt Studies in English Language Teaching Vol. 6, No. 4, 2018 334 Published by SCHOLINK INC. authorities should design a specific culture oriented syllabus that covers all the different levels of English learning at secondary school level. In this regard, all the variables (setting, cultural, institutional, linguistic, and methodological) should be taken into account and mainstreamed in the curriculum. In the same vein, EFL teachers should consider Culture as an integrative factor in language teaching process.


Attitudes and Cultural Awareness
Cultural awareness reveals its development at three levels; two of which were mentioned in the previous part, and the third one in this part. The third element refers to the emotional change in the individual or to his attitudes towards the target culture and its people. Indeed, the role of attitudes has been investigated to be of great significance in second and foreign language learning development, especially in learning the foreign culture.
The relationship between cultural awareness and attitudes was first introduced by  in his notion of intercultural communicative competence with the five savoirs. This idea was inspired from the role of attitudes in second language learning. In fact, attitudes have been proved to be either a cause or a result of successful second and foreign language learning. According to Byram's model, attitudes are of a dual role. The first is that attitudes can be a cause for achieving intercultural communicative competence or one of its components (in addition to knowledge and skills), in the sense that they refer to the willingness and readiness to learn about others' perceptions and to communicate with them. Yet, he stressed the significance of the learners' attitudinal changes as an important outcome of intercultural communicative competence that enhances their language proficiency and influences their intercultural communication. In other words, Byram considered cultural awareness in its affective dimension to be crucial and important for successful intercultural communication and an interesting element in intercultural communicative competence. Despite the difference in his perception of attitudes from that of Byram, McDonough (1981) believed that success in target language learning and positive attitudes are interdependent. Expressed differently, success in foreign language learning leads to gaining positive attitudes towards the target language people.
Additionally, though Gaston (1984), Hanvey (1979) and Oxford (1994), though differ in their focus of the most representative aspect of cultural awareness achievement, they all agree upon the significant psychological changes in the learners' personality and perceptions towards the target culture as an initial step for cultural awareness development. Risager (2007, p. 24) was, also, one of the proponents different angle. That is, holding positive attitudes about the target culture and recognizing the nature of communication help the learners to adopt new patterns of communication, different from their own, and accept that of the foreigners. Positive attitudes, then, allow the learners to move from ethnocentricity and overwhelming feelings towards the native cultural patterns and behaviours to ethnorelativity, acceptance, and appreciation of differences between cultures. Little wood was more interested in the role of attitudes in the learners' language proficiency achievement, in a direct way, rather than through cultural awareness. In the same vein, Brown (1987) argued that the enhancement of linguistic proficiency involves some affective feelings such as the excitement at the newness and the shock at the difference.
Gardner and Lambert (1972) were also interested in the role of attitudes in second language learning and its correlation with motivation. They reached a conclusion that the learners' motivation is a set of collected attitudes that urge them, either positively or negatively, to learn the foreign language and culture. Thus, holding positive attitudes towards the target culture gives the learner an integrative motivation or a desire to learn more about the target language in order to be able to communicate with its speakers successfully and appropriately, as expressed by Lambert (1972, p. 180): "motivation to learn is thought to be determined by the learner's attitudes and by his orientation towards learning a second language". Another area where attitudes, particularly socio-cultural awareness, play a vital role in culture learning is when the learners experience culture shocks in their communication with natives. Culture shock is a term introduced by Oberg (1960, p. 1)  f) Feelings of helplessness because of not coping well in the new environment. Adler (1975) was also interested in culture shock. For him, cultural shock is a process rather than a single psychological event. It involves five stages ranging from the "honeymoon stage" to the "reciprocal interdependence stage". Yet, he believed in its positive dimension in the learning process.
Moreover, culture shock, according to Adler, is related mainly to intercultural, which leads to develop self-awareness and self-perception growth.
Another important figure in this area of study is Brown (2007, p. 280) where culture shock is seen as "the process of acculturation, phenomena involving mild irritability, depression, anger, or possibly deep psychological crisis due to the foreignness of the new cultural milieu". Thus, people, who learn and understand the cross-cultural differences, develop positive attitudes that enable them to be successful in A similar view to that of Byram is that of Hofstede (2002) who saw culture as "a set of emotional and psychological organizations or programs internalized by the members of a given society which urge them to have some specific psychological and particular reactions" (cited in Shaules, 2007, p. 50 Hofstede raised, is that "the core of intercultural awareness is learning to separate observation from interpretation" (Hofstede, 2002, p. 17). This is to say that the communicator should focus on actual behaviour in his interaction rather than personal interpretations that he makes about that behavior (which may result in prejudice, common stereotypes and generalizations). According to Hofstede, interpretation of the foreigner's behavior should not be from one's native standpoint, but rather from the foreigner's perception of values. This of course, is not an easy matter; it needs a deep understanding of the target culture and ability to decentre oneself. Culture shock, for him, occurs after living a long time in the foreign culture and may cause a feeling of frustration for the individual in his attempts to adjust and accommodate to the new cultural environment. It should be mentioned, here, that Hofstedes's views are similar to that of Brooks (2004).
Attitudes have been proved to be of a significant value in second language learning, in general, and in cultural awareness, in particular. Change of intuitive attitudes, common stereotypes, and development from ethnocentricity to empathy and appreciation of foreign cultures are the signs of cultural awareness development, which in turn, help for succeeding in intercultural communication.

Intercultural Communicative Competence and Cultural Awareness
Cultural awareness development has been used to refer to some change in attitudes in the learner's mind toward the target culture and its people. Indeed, attitudes are seen as the key element in managing successful communication. Thus, cultural awareness recently gained grounds in the field of foreign language teaching because of its basic concern with attitudes; a basic element in intercultural communicative competence.
For a long time now, albeit in vain, specialists in the field of foreign language teaching haves strived to train students to communicate successfully using the target language in different contexts. Yet, the emergence of the communication theory, which emphasizes the role of attitudes in communication, has inspired researchers to make of the intercultural dimension of language a goal of communicative competence that gives more validity and importance to the attitudinal aspect of the learners.
Intercultural communicative competence was, then, set as a surrogate to communicative competence.
In addition to the knowledge and skills that the latter comprises, the term intercultural communicative competence coined by Byram includes a third element known as attitudes. These three dimensions are categorised in the five proposed components or savoirs that make up intercultural communicative competence which are knowledge (savoir), skills (savoir comprendre, apprendre and faire), and attitudes (savoir-etre) where the focus is on the willingness to discover and know about others' perceptions in life, and dispositions and orientations to act (savoir s'engager) where the research focus is cultural awareness.
Despite the classification of these components, as mentioned above, they are interlinked and correlate with each other in practice. Each component supports the other as for example with "savoir-etre" and "savoir s'engager" as investigated in the present research and which constitutes its main concern. In addition, developing cultural awareness cannot occur without a personal willingness on the part of the learner to engage in making different relationship with people of the foreign language or in the case of having inherited negative stereotypes about the foreign culture. Cultural awareness, according to Byram et al. (2001, p. 53), is "the ability to evaluate critically and on the basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices, and products, in one's own and others' cultures and countries".
Seen from this perspective, cultural awareness is primarily linked to cognitive processes of comparison, analysis and evaluation of one's own and foreign views on the basis of explicit behavior. It contributes to the making of an intercultural speaker who appreciates the two cultures, his own and that of the foreign language. It permits the learner to step from his judgments as an outsider of the foreign culture to see and feel as an insider after putting his own deep culture in awareness rather than out of awareness. This collaboration between the two cultures allows the learner to be in-between or go-between situations as claimed by Byram and Zarate (1994) to which Kramsch referred as a sphere of interculturality and mediation between the two cultures. Byram's idea of cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence seems, for me, to be more realistic and appropriate to the foreign language classroom setting, unlike the other works, which are more ideal and cannot serve the context of language education.
More important, I believe that cultural awareness is a central element in the development of intercultural communicative competence and during the foreign language learning process as a whole. It is the first step towards developing positive attitudes about the foreign culture and its people, which, in turn, affects the learners' communicative acts in the foreign language, and thereby achieving the development of their language proficiency, a basic and crucial aim of learning and teaching foreign languages. This growing importance has prompted many researchers to provide some teaching models, which emphasize cultural awareness as an inevitable element, as, will be demonstrated in the following sections.

Cultural Awareness and the Teaching of Culture
Cultural awareness has proved its primary role in the learners' language proficiency achievement and communicative performance effectiveness in the foreign language. Many researchers have, consequently, tried to present some culture teaching models, which make of cultural competence a central element or objective to achieve. Hence, two recently proposed models are to be presented in this part.
The first model to be dealt with is the one Byram outlined in his book Mediating Languages and Cultures (1991). This model has four parts or components; two of a cultural nature and the two others relate to language. This comprehensive model is a result of the belief in the intertwined relationship between language and culture and the non-possibility of teaching language and culture separately but language-and -culture in tandem (Byram & Morgan, 1994). Byram's viewpoint on the relationship between language and culture is that "language is not simply a reflector of an objective cultural reality but an integral part of that reality through which other parts are shaped and interpreted" (Byram, 1991, p. 18). Consequently, teaching a foreign language implies, indirectly, teaching its culture at the same time. His model makes use of two major techniques: the use of the learners' mother tongue in comparison between the native and the foreign cultural aspects and teaching language as a subject and medium of experience. Expressed differently, Byram used these two techniques in the process of applying his model, which involves language learning, language awareness, culture awareness, and interchangeably. To phrase differently, cultural awareness goes in parallel with awareness of the language; the study of the nature of the language as a social and cultural phenomenon following a comparative analysis of the two linguistic systems and their cultural meanings.
Cultural experience would, also, intervene in cultural awareness by selecting activities about some cultural phenomena presented to the learners and to be performed using the foreign language. The learners' socio-cultural awareness can also be raised through comparative analyses of the linguistic and cultural meanings of the native language and the target language. Language awareness, in this sense, can support the acquisition of linguistic skills by making the learners reflect on the different social function, which the learnt linguistic structures can be used to fulfill. More importantly, the learnt linguistic forms themselves can be used to reinforce the cultural and language experience learners are presented with. Language learning is, thus, seen as a rehearsal process of the already learnt knowledge as well as being used as a medium of experiencing cultural situations. Subsequently, all these elements are of equal importance and opportunity to be applied. Yet, Byram mentioned that the time of applying them depends on the learners' level and the degree of achievement of each of these components.
However, he insisted that cultural awareness is deemed a crucial objective to be reached by all these components, which may enable the learners to change their attitudes towards the common stereotypes, and puts them in the feet of ethnographers and informants, hence building new schemata and developing intercultural communicative competence.
The second model is that of Kramsch(1993), who stressed cultural awareness as a crucial aim in foreign language teaching. Like Byram, Kramsch advocated the interrelationship between language and culture but from a different angle. According to her, the relationship is that of text and context, as presented by Halliday and Hassan (1989). Culture is seen not as a fifth skill in foreign language teaching. Instead, it is integrated in language teaching because language learning is a social practice that takes place in a surrounding context, which, in turn, helps in interpreting it. Therefore, language expresses personal thought and reflects social order. Culture, on the other hand, refers to "facts and meanings as well as a place of struggle between the learners' meanings and those of native speakers" (Kramsch, 1993, p. 24).
This struggle would be revealed in dialogues. Thus, the teacher's role is not to dictate to the learners how to react in such situations but to give them space to reflect by themselves and find appropriate interpretations useful for understanding the opposed viewpoints of the natives. This can be done through recognizing the space of differences with the natives in favour of similarities. Kramsch's model focuses on differences from a dialogic perspective. The learner should look at the foreign perspectives in relation to his own, hence to focus on what is culture-specific rather than what is culture universal.
Thus, the learner would be expected to decentre from his own culture and become a mediator between his and the target cultures.
Another point, which supports the hypothesis investigated in the present research, is the idea that "culture awareness must be viewed both as enabling language proficiency and as being the outcome of reflection on language proficiency", Kramsch developed. Lastly, she (1993, pp. 205-206) has set the following principles to teach culture: a) Setting up a sphere of inter-culturality: to relate first culture to foreign culture and to reflect on conceptions of first culture and foreign culture.

b)
Teaching culture as an interpersonal process: to present not only cultural facts in a structural way, but also to present understanding processes, values, beliefs or attitudes; c) Teaching culture as difference: culture is not only national traits, but also race, gender, social Cultural awareness is fundamental in foreign language teaching particularly in the development of intercultural communicative competence and language proficiency; the basic teaching goals of foreign languages. Developing positive attitudes towards the target culture via comparison of differences between the native and the target culture prompts the learners' ability to use the language efficiently in communicative acts with foreigners.

Research Design
The research question guiding this study what was Beninese EFL post-beginners' attitudes towards the English culture and what was the impact of cultural awareness on their language proficiency development. To answer these questions, a quantitative analysis was carried out. The research design included a test (known as "Written Discourse Completion Task") for data collection.

Research Population
The region emphasized in this study is the Littoral region of Benin. As such, we have selected the participant students from schools located in this region. The total number of participants is 360. It is important to note that, in each school, students were selected from SS1 (18 students) and SS3 (18 students). Therefore, the 360 EFL learners have been selected randomly at the rate of 36 per school from ten secondary schools of the region. These secondary schools are namely CEG Littoral, CEG le Nokoué , CEG Akpakpa-centre, CEG Suru-Lere, CEG Gbé gamey, CEG Houé yiho, CEG Dantokpa, CEG Kouhounou-Vè doko, CEG les Pylônes and CEG Zogbo. During the random selection, there were finally more boys than girls in the sample. But we were not interested in carrying out analyses related to gender in this study,

Research Instruments
We have used the Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT henceforth) as the test to collect the data necessary for my study.
The WDCT is a widely used research tool in because of its simplicity and practicability in dealing with the participants' performance in naturally occurring interaction.
In this study, the version of the WDCT used is made up of three parts. The first part is meant to collect some background information about the students. The second part aims to get some insights into the participants' linguistic and pragmatic knowledge. The third and last part evaluates the informants' cultural knowledge and awareness of the English culture. the interlocutors because of cross-cultural differences in beliefs and patterns of behaviors.

Procedures for Data Collection and Analysis
Data collection was organized from October to November 2016 during the 2016-2017 academic years.
Authorities in the selected schools have been orally informed. So, no official letter of any kind was sent to them. After this step, the participants were kept, in each school in two groups: the group of SS1 students and the one of SS3 students. By the start of the study, instead of 360 participants planned, only 300 effectively took part in the test. The valid responses obtained and used for data analysis were actually 260 students.
Following Allah (2016), data analysis is to be considered as a methodical process that consists in selecting, categorizing, comparing, synthesizing and interpreting data to provide relevant explanations of the problem under study. Therefore, the analysis process truly starts with a large quantity of data that is further cut down to small sets. Here, data analysis has been done through the use of Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheets to realize the tables and/or diagrams displayed in the following chapter, which deals with the findings of the study.

Findings
The total number of participants considered in this analysis is 260 distributed equally between SS1 and SS3 students. As such, there are 130 SS1 students and 130 SS3 students.

 Background Information
 Question Items 1.4, 1.5 &1.6 To diagnose the participants' motivation in studying English at the university is the aim of question items 1.4, 1.5 & 1.6. In question item 1.4, participants were asked: Was studying English your first choice:

Yes No
Question item 1.5 is a follow up to the previous question and requires the participants who answered the previous question negatively to say how they feel now that they are studying English and were given the following options: In fact, studying English was a personal choice of 80% of the participants, whereas, some of the participants (20%) were interested in other areas of study. Yet, despite the fact that English was not their first choice at the beginning, they then claimed to be motivated in studying it since their answer to the question item 1.5 was (b) with a percentage of 20%. By correlating the responses of question items  Question item 1.6, too, requires the participants, who chose response (a) in question item 1.5, i.e., those who claim that they feel bored in studying English, to say whether their boredom was due to:

a-Other interests and expectations b-Your negative attitudes towards the English people c-Differences in beliefs and concepts between your culture and the English culture
Responses to 1.6 were not supplied then. Participants neither had negative attitudes towards English people nor apathetic to learn English because of cultural differences in beliefs and concepts.
Accordingly, the forthcoming analysis of the data will take into account the students' motivation in learning English, an important variable in the learning process, in general, and cultural awareness acquisition, in particular.
 Question Items 1.7 &1.8 Question items 1.7 and 1.8 aim at probing the students' self-concept and awareness of their ability to communicate successfully with foreigners. The questions also aim at diagnosing the students' realization of the nature of communication that involves culture alongside the language used as well as the different aspects that are necessary for successful communication.
Question item 1.7 enquires the participants about their views with regard to their ability/inability to run a conversation with a native speaker. The participants had to answer with "Yes" or "No".
Question item 1.8 is designed specifically to those who considered themselves unable to do so. It deals with the possible hindrances that would face them when conversing with natives using the target language. This item dictates: If no, is it because of: has many interpretations that will be presented later in the discussion.
Participants, at this level thought they had sufficient linguistic knowledge (a) about English, i.e., they master its grammar and vocabulary as well as the pragmatic knowledge (answer c). They did not have any problems with these two language aspects involved in communication. The two basic obstacles were the lack of cultural knowledge and self-confidence. More details are presented in the following 

Linguistic and Pragmatic Competence
The following part investigates the participants' linguistic and pragmatic knowledge. These two elements were included in this test on the basis of the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC henceforth) components that were set by Byram (1997 In question item (2.2), the participants were required to "Indicate the different meanings that the term 'right' has in a given conversation excerpt". The meanings referred are linguistically and culturally loaded connotations. The expected answers are the following: Right (1) The participants did not give these exact words but used some terms that give the approximate meaning.
Statistically speaking, with regard to SS1 participants, the overall percentage of the correct answers was 27.62%. These results show that the subjects' linguistic competence is below average. In the analysis of the participants' responses to the two question items related to the linguistic aspects of the language, it becomes clear that the participants did better with the first question with 18.10% and only 9.52% of their answers to second question. Hence, the correct answers to question item 2.1 could possibly be a matter of coincidence. Thus, in relation to the participants' responses to the question item 1.8 which indicates that 26.67% of their weakness is because of linguistic problems, it can be said that the participants were aware of their actual abilities.
As far as SS3, participants are concerned; their responses show that 61.92% of their answers are correct.
Their linguistic competence was better in comparison to that of second year participants' linguistic knowledge as shown in the This was, also, proved by answers to question item 2.2 where 11.92% of the answers were correct.
Participants understood and differentiated the different meanings that the term "right" has in the given conversation excerpt. In this part, there were no blank answers given by the subjects, as it was the case with first year participants. This shows the participants' achievements of linguistic competence. This sub-part is designed to evaluate pragmatic knowledge and competence. In fact, the content of this part comprises two situations where the participants are required to choose the appropriate expression in relation to the surrounding context.
In 2.3.1, the situation requires the respondents to apologize to someone after pushing him accidently.
The statement is the following:

You accidently push someone behind you when getting on a bus s/he almost falls down. You say:
a-Excuse me, I did not see you.
b-I beg your pardon.
c-I am sorry, I did not see you.
In fact, each of these expressions has its appropriate context of use. The appropriate expression to apologize, in this situation, is "I am sorry, I did not see you".
The statistics of SS3 participants was higher than that of first year participants. Indeed, 73.32% of the respondents succeeded in selecting the appropriate answer (c) whereas the rest (13.34%) was distributed between options (a) and (b).
In 2.3.2, the subjects are exposed to a situation where sociolinguistic rules should be taken into account rather than the pragmatic ones. The situation is about: When you speak about a boss who takes right decisions concerning his employees, you say: a-He is good.

b-He is correct. c-He is fair.
In this situation, too, the appropriate expression to be selected is (c), "He is fair" because option (a) good or (b) correct do not fit such a situation.
The answers of SS1 participants in this situation are distributed as follows: Option (c) = 40%, Option (a) = 33.34% and Option (b) = 26.66%. Concerning SS3 students' distribution, it is as follows: Option (a) = 6.67%, Option (b) = 6.67%, Option (c) = 86.66%. These results are given below in tabular format: 26.67% of them claimed that their failure to communicate successfully with natives is because of the lack of pragmatic knowledge(c), the possible explanation that can be given is that their answers to the first situation were a matter of pragmatic transfer. SS1 participants seem to have resorted to transfer their native language linguistic and social rules and apply that on English as a solution to their deficiency and lack of pragmatic rules that correspond to such situation.
Unlike SS1 participants, SS3 students' responses were not a matter of pragmatic transfer. This is revealed by the comparison between the two situations given (73.32% in the first situation and 86.66% in the second one) and the high total percentage in pragmatics with 80%. Moreover, these participants showed their awareness of their own actual abilities as they claim to have no problem in pragmatics (0% for inability to use linguistic expressions appropriately in 1.8).
All in all, SS3 participants have actually developed a certain degree of linguistic and pragmatic competence, as they claim in 1.8, in comparison to SS1 participants.

 Cultural Knowledge and Awareness
In the last part of the questionnaire administered to participants, the focus is on the cultural aspect of learning a foreign language. In other words, the purpose of this part is to probe the subjects' cultural knowledge of the English culture. It is divided into two main parts, the first is devoted to socio-cultural knowledge about the English etiquette and behavior and the second is devoted to cultural awareness where the participants were required to react and to hypothesize about possible reactions of native speakers in given situations. To start with, question items 3.1 and 3.2 are designed to test the participants' cultural knowledge. In the first situation (3.1), unlike all the previous questions, the informants were required to fill in the gaps with correct answers. In this question item, no response choices were given. The participants were All the statements given are false. The data obtained from SS1 student participants, on the one hand, show that 41.66% of them gave correct answers. Approximately, half of the answers given were obtained.
On the other hand, 50% of the SS3subjects gave correct answers. Thus, it can be said that both categories of participants were imparted with enough behavioral patterns of English culture but with an improvement within third year sample. Additionally, the majority of the correct responses in 3.1 were that of (c) and (d).
This is, in fact, one of the contradictions that emerge from the results obtained. Participants were expected to have more factual knowledge of the English culture rather than knowledge about English social behavioral patterns. This can have two explanations: either participants are more interested in acquiring knowledge about English people behavioural patterns and their social rules that would serve their daily use of the language instead of internalizing bulk of useless factual knowledge or that their acceptable performance in 3.2 was a matter of coincidence.
SS3 participants' total performance in this part (3.1 and 3.2) is measured with 29.09% in comparison to 21.82% of the SS1 participants. This indicates that culture acquisition is consistent with language acquisition; one of the interesting points of this research hypothesis. Question item 3.3 tries to achieve one of the present research aims. It attempts to highlight the influence of cultural awareness on the participants' language proficiency and communicative performance. In this part, the informants were presented with two different situations that may cause some misunderstanding between people, especially a native and a non-native speaker.
In 3.3.1, the situation is a business call dialogue. Thus, formality and politeness between the interlocutors were to be taken into consideration because of the common conversational and social rules followed in such contexts (politeness the conversational sequences to be followed in order to establish social relationships). In this conversation excerpt, there was no consensus in interaction between the interlocutors (Cooperative principle of Grice). This would engender an intercultural misunderstanding and a disorientation of the participants behavioural reaction because of unexpected answers interpreted in a wrong way. This misinterpretation of the businessman's intention would reveal the participants' lack of cultural awareness. The problematic expression is "I am hot" as a response to "how are you". There were three different answers that may indicate the participants' position; whether they had some degree of cultural awareness or not, and how that would influence their language proficiency or language fluency in communication. The appropriate reaction, which indicates the participants' cultural awareness, is (b). Choosing the third option would indicate the opposite, i.e., the participants' unawareness.
Statistically speaking, SS1 participants' answers distribution was as follows: 6.66% of the participants chose (b) (right answer); 33.34% (a) and 60% (c). These results show the informants' unawareness of this culturally loaded linguistic expression and reveal clearly its influence on the conversation flow. The participants, here, did not take the behaviour as it is but did interpret it before reacting, a basic hindrance in achieving intercultural awareness (Hofstede, 2002).
These statistics show that despite their low performance in this situation, more improvement or awareness is acquired in comparison with the SS1 students' group.
The second situation (3.3.2) is approximately similar. The puzzling answer is "yes, in a manner of speaking" as a response of a stranger to a student's enquiry about his job "Oh, yes, are you a student".
The three reactions given are as follows: a-You continue asking questions till you understand his job.
b-You stop talking to him.
c-You change the topic.
The expected answer is: (a). the two other options (c and d) indicate unawareness or misinterpretation of the stranger's response.
Concerning this situation, the data generated from SS1 students' sample show that 46.67% of the participants answered (a), 26.67% answered (b) and 26.67% answered (c). In this situation, approximately, half of the participants responded appropriately.
For SS3 informants, the generated data show that 60% answered (a), 20% answered (b) and 20% answered (c). In this situation, too, a development of the SS3 participants' performance is clear. As mentioned in the above figure, a contradiction between the two situations in first year collected data is noticeable. The second situation was correctly answered in comparison with the first one. This can have many interpretations: first, the expression used in the second situation does not cause as much misunderstanding on the part of the participants as that in the first situation. Second, the participants did not recognize the real meaning of the expression "I am hot", or that the obtained data of responses on this situation was a matter of shared cultural values between the participants and not a matter of awareness.
Another important point in this part is that the obtained data of SS1 students from the two situations reveal some of Hofstede values theory. This is clearly shown by the two highly scored answers 60% (  The last part in this WDCT is in the form of MCQ with three options in four situations that involve culturally bound reactions. It aims at uncovering the students' cultural awareness in terms of cross-cultural differences in beliefs and concepts between the English and Beninese native cultures.
The informants were required to hypothesize about a native's reaction in some given situations and to give their own reactions in the same situation.
The data generated about the participants' reactions will be evaluated in relation to the frequency of occurrences for each given item, for both their own reaction as Beninese people and their hypotheses about the English people reactions.
In this part, the obtained data for SS1 informants show that 32% only were able to hypothesize appropriately concerning the native speaker's reaction. This clearly shows the participants' unawareness of the cross-cultural differences between the native and the target culture. While for SS3 participants, 51.42% of them were able to hypothesize appropriately concerning the native speaker's reaction.

 Situation 3.4.1
In the first situation (3.4.1), there was a man who scattered another man's bag on the ground while he was hurrying in order to be on time for his job interview. The participants were required to give their own reactions as well as that of the native speaker from this set of options if they were in the place of the first man (who was in a hurry): a-To apologize and keep running.
b-Not to apologize and to keep running.

c-To stop, apologize, and give the man a hand to gather what is scattered.
Concerning the English people reaction, the appropriate answer was (c) obtained by 20% of SS1 participants, while 60% was given to (a) and 20% to (b). With regard to their own reactions (as Beninese) in this situation, 80% answered (c) and 20% answered (a) and 0% answered (b).
For SS3 participants' responses on the native speaker reaction, the obtained data was as follows: 46.66% (a); 13.34% (b); 40% (c), With regard to their own reaction, 66.66% answered (c), 6.66% answered (b); and 26.66% answered (a). This data are displayed in the figure below :  their own reactions is as follows: (b) 66.66%; (a) 20%; and 13.34% for (c).this data is displayed shown in the following figure: The appropriate answer to this situation as provided by the near native speaker is either (b) or (c).
Concerning SS1 participants data, the answers' distribution about the native reaction was as follows: 40% (a); 40% (b); and 20% (c), while they chose to react as in(c) with 100%.
For SS3 participants' data, the two appropriate answers about the English native reaction were scored with 40% to (b) and 40% to (c) while (a) was chosen by 20% of the participants. Meanwhile, their own reactions were distributed as follows: 60% (c); 13.34% (b); 26.66% (a). This data is displayed in the In order to clarify the picture of the participants' overall performance in the Discourse Completion Task,   Table 11 below presents the overall results obtained in the different parts: This summary table shows clearly the differences between the performances of SS1 and SS3 students either in linguistic or cultural knowledge. This reveals that the more learners progress in their learning of English, the more they develop their knowledge about the linguistic, pragmatic and cultural aspects of language. Additionally, despite the fact that all the participants are motivated, a difference between their linguistic and cultural input is revealed. Linguistic knowledge is higher than the cultural one, which means that culture is not equally acquired/taught as the grammatical rules of English.

Discussion
As can be observed through each of the tables displayed above, many conclusions and interpretations can be drawn either at level of difference between the two sample participants performances or at the level of the whole performance between the different parts that comprise the test. These conclusions will be presented below because of a correlation of the whole test obtained results in different parts.
Starting from the main conclusion of this research, Beninese learners' cultural awareness is not perfectly acquired. Indeed, they do show a lack of cultural awareness of the cultural dimension of English being a foreign language in Benin. This is the case of both SS1 and SS3participants, despite the subtle improvement in their performances, as mentioned in last part of the test (3.4) in the four different situations.
Subjects, then, have not suspended their common stereotypes about the English people and do use their own cultural values as a standard to judge natives behaviours. They have not developed from their feeling of ethnocentricity to ethno-relativity because of their unawareness of the cross-cultural differences between their culture and the English one. Moreover, participants do not react as they observe the behavior but as they interpret it. Meanwhile, a culturally aware person is the one who can deal with the actual behavior as it is with no interpretation that is based on his own stereotypes so that to avoid misinterpretations of culturally different behaviors (Hofstede, 2002).
Another point, which corresponds to Hofstede theory, is that of the shared cultural values. This was investigated in the participants' responses about their own reactions in 3.4 to the given situations.
Participants in this research share the same cultural values or visions that influence their behaviors in communication.
Moreover, the lack of cultural awareness has influenced their linguistic and communicative performance in English, that is to say the lack of cultural awareness accounts for their language proficiency enhancement failure as mentioned in (3.3) where 6, 66% in 3.3.1 and 46.67% in 3.3.2 of SS1 participants have correctly responded the two situations while 20 % in 3.3.1 and 60% in 3.3.2 by SS3 participants.
Linguistic knowledge proved to be insufficient for developing language proficiency and enhancing cultural awareness. As the case with SS3 participants, despite their good performance in linguistics and pragmatics (65.92%), and the low performance in cultural knowledge evaluation (29.09%), their cultural awareness is not yet perfectly acquired. Additionally, the lack of cultural knowledge has been proved in 2.2 where some cultural knowledge was necessary to answer in a correct way where only 9.52% of answers were obtained by SS1 participants and 11.92%. Similarly, this lack of cultural knowledge was proved in 2.3. SS1 participants showed their pragmatic transfer from their native language into English as mentioned in the obtained results between the two situations: 66.66% in 2.3.1 and 40% in 2.3.2.
Thus, teaching foreign languages in Benin may be considered as having missed the focus on the cultural side of the foreign language and country, which accounts for the learners' failure to run conversations in the target language or to achieve successful intercultural communication, hence holding negative attitudes about strangers. This point can be deduced from the learners' motivation to learn English and their unawareness of the cross-cultural differences between cultures and the cultural dimension of the foreign language and its effects on their language proficiency. The focus, as revealed from the data obtained, is laid on teaching linguistics, grammar rules, and vocabulary items, the necessary but not the only elements included in communication.
All these conclusions mean that students do not recognize the cultural aspect of the language despite their close relationship, which was proved in the dual and simultaneous improvement of SS3 students' performance in linguistics, and cultural knowledge, which, in turn, engenders their lack of cultural awareness being a key element in language proficiency and intercultural communicative competence.
In sum, it can be said that the Beninese learners' cultural awareness level is not sufficient to enable them to achieve successful communication in the target language. Despite the fact that they have enough linguistic knowledge about English, the lack of cultural knowledge is the source of their failure in acquiring cultural awareness. Thus, some recommendations and suggestions about enhancing the learners' cultural awareness that would help them to gain positive attitudes about the English culture will be formulated in the following chapter.

Conclusion
In sum, the results of this study have shown that Beninese learners' cultural awareness level is not sufficient to enable them to achieve successful communication in the target language. Despite the fact that they have enough linguistic knowledge about English, the lack of cultural knowledge is the source of their failure in acquiring cultural awareness.
Further studies are needed to address the limitations to the present study among which one limitation is related to the research instruments: a test has been used for data collection since, as indicated by