Exploring The Target Culture Component In Secondary School

Abstract

The present research focuses on the area of foreign culture teaching in the foreign language classroom in an Algerian secondary school. It attempts to discover the attitudes and perceptions of third year secondary school students . It also intends to evaluate the cultural content of the Algerian 3rd year secondary school textbook of English ‘New Prospects’. The analysis of the data collected with the research instruments employed in this study, namely the students’ questionnaire and the textbook evaluation checklist, has revealed that learners are interested and curious to learn about other people’s culture. The evaluation of the cultural content of the textbook indicates that the target culture is presented in a superficial way which shows that Algerian textbook designers still give more importance to developing learners’ linguistic competence and neglect the cultural aspect of the target language.