Integrating culture in teaching literary texts and cultural taboos: Foreign language students’ perceptions and attitudes

Abstract

Literature and culture intimately complement each other. Culture is a vehicle by which literary texts emanate values, social rules and beliefs. The connection between literature and culture must be tackled in foreign language classrooms for the ultimate objective of learning the target civilisation. The current research focuses primarily on the importance of bringing literature and culture into the classroom. The focal points of this paper are to shed lights on which cultures literature tutors ought to focus on, what kind of texts to expose students to, how best to lead teaching and which cultural themes need to be tackled. Classroom observational sessions are used for two academic years 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 with second-year students at Dr. Moulay Tahar University of Saida. The findings reveal that students do not favour texts that have cultural taboos. Thereby, using appropriate and interesting literature in the foreign language classroom would engage and motivate learners, as well as challenge their beliefs.

Keywords: Classroom, connection, culture, foreign language students, literature.