Prospective teachers’ attitudes and relations toward the culture of English-speaking countries regarding their specialisation

Abstract

By using spontaneous metaphor research, our paper investigates prospective primary school teachers’ attitudes and relations toward the culture of English-speaking countries and learning English as a foreign language. Metaphors reveal people’s subconscious ideas and understandings towards their beliefs and attitudes, in this case, towards the culture of English-speaking countries. The participants consisted of student teachers specialising in English (N=12) or another specialisation (N=20). In addition, students’ English proficiency was also reflected in this grouping, which helped to demonstrate the effects of prior English knowledge and experiences. An elicitation sheet with the unfinished sentence, “Foreign language learning is like ... because ...” was used as the tool of data collection. The data were analysed qualitatively by coding, categorising, and finalising the metaphors. The present paper focuses exclusively on the data in connection with the concept of culture while analyses of the other concepts are described in Kisné Bernhardt and Furcsa (2020). The findings of the metaphor research revealed different attitudes according to teacher students’ specialisations and therefore contribute to a deeper understanding of selecting appropriate approaches to English teaching. In our paper, we first describe the importance and role of cultural beliefs in language teaching, then we focus on various aspects of metaphor research. The sociocultural dimension of metaphor research aims at investigating the involvement of sociocultural factors in the process of conceptualisation. In the second part of the paper, the findings of our metaphor research are presented.