Cultivating EFL students’ intercultural communicative competence through cultural memes analysis : the case of third year students at the department of english, theuniversity of Guelma

Abstract

At the dawn of the 21st century, intercultural competence is stressed more than ever before. Notwithstanding, intercultural education is found to be scarcely introduced to third year EFL learners at Guelma University, Algeria. Therefore, this research aims to cultivate Guelma University third year EFL learners' intercultural communicative competence through cultural memes analysis using multimodal discourse analysis. To attain this goal, quasi-experimental and mixed-methods designs were adopted. Two questionnaires were administered to EFL teachers and third year students at Guelma University as situational and needs assessment tools. Findings from the questionnaires revealed the absence of intercultural education in the aforementioned setting, students' low intercultural competence, and their positive attitudes towards memes-based learning. A quasi-experiment with two intact groups of third year EFL students at Guelma University was carried out. The quantitative findings from the pretest-posttests of the experiment using the Mann Whitney U and Wilcoxon Signed-ranks tests revealed that using cultural memes analysis has contributed to enhancing students' intercultural communicative competence in oral classes. A significant difference of p=0.00> 0.05 in favour of the experimental group, in contrast to the control one, was found. The qualitative findings from the experiment's classroom discussions, observation, students' reflection journals, and focus group discussion revealed that all dimensions of intercultural communicative competence, namely, knowledge, attitudes, skills and critical cultural awareness were cultivated. The treatment also revealed that memes-based learning increases participation, boosts motivation, and reduces anxiety and boredom. Eventually, the study outlined some pedagogical implications and recommendations to ameliorate intercultural education and memes-based learning in the Algerian EFL classes