Literature 51
From ‘Chapter Five: The Place of FC in the Academic EFL Instructors’ Practice’ in Al-
Asmari, Abdul (2008). Integration of Foreign Culture Into Pre-service EFL Teacher
Education: A Case Study of Saudi Arabia, p. 202. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of
Melbourne.
As for practice, academic EFL instructors’ practice confirmed their static perceptions of FC
which was incidentally presented in the form of information about FC. Also, the instructors’
practice was negatively affected by their perceptions of culturally sensitive issues, which
were policy-influenced and misconceived. Thus, FC in their teaching practice appeared to
be largely minimised and disguised. The instructors’ generalisation of culturally sensitive
issues and influence of curriculum policies encouraged excluding many FC aspects. While
previous studies indicated that political factors and community hindered translating teach-
ers’ awareness into action (Byram and Risager 1999; Kramsch et al. 1996), political factors
in this study are linked to the curriculum policies which were found to provide no support
for the place of FC. Further, instructors’ background and lack of sufficient cultural knowl-
edge emerged as challenges to the place of FC in pre-service EFL teacher education. For the
conservative context of SA, these findings may provide interpretations for a previous study
in the SEFL context of Secondary Education where teachers held reservations and worries
over the students’ beliefs and values (Al-Qahtani 2003).
Confirming findings from the document analysis, there was a deficiency in exposure
to FC in the current curriculum worsened by the monocultural context conditions. On the
other hand, computer technology emerged as a crucial medium that could provide exposure
to FC by offering FC input and facilitate pedagogy and communication. Barriers to the
use of computer technology such as instructors’ insufficient computer literacy and lack of
access were issues to be dealt with as structural limitations at the policy level. However,
issues of cultural security online require further involvement on the instructors’ part to pro-
vide guidance to pre-service EFL teachers on appropriate cultural recourses.
In the chapter that follows, I narrow down the focus of discussion to cover emerging
findings of this chapter that can be further elaborated at the EFL learning level. Based
on these findings, I analyse the pre-service SEFL teachers’ responses and relevant obser-
vations to enhance the credibility of assumptions made in relation to the place of FC in
practice. Table 42 below provides a concept mapping of the key themes and findings of this
chapter and further issues to be investigated in the following chapter.In the first paragraph, Abdul gives a strong summary of the main findings of his
work with academics and relates this to current theory in his field. In the second
paragraph, he relates these results to his earlier analysis of curriculum documents
and is quite clear about the implications of these findings. The conclusion in the
third paragraph provides a strong lead into his next chapter, in which he focuses on
the next group of participant data, and finally concludes with a summary table. You
might like to check to see whether his conclusions do respond to the aim he stated
in his introduction, as given earlier.
Literature
Creating a thesis involves a lot more than writing, of course. For one thing, there’s
the small matter of finding a question and doing the research! A great many kinds of
activities go into creating a thesis. Most of these are beyond the scope of this book,
but a critical one is the search for relevant literature.