The Effect of Foreign Language Learning on Iranian EFL Learners‘ Cultural Perception

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the instruction of English, as a foreign language, has any significant effect on cultural perception of Iranian EFL learners. This study included two groups. Twenty intermediate male and female university students, taking general English courses in Elmi-Karbordi Shahrdariha Khorasan Shomali University, Iran, were the participants of the first group of this study. The participants of the second group were the parents of the participants of the first group. After selecting the samples, a 20 item questionnaire prepared by Zarei and Pourghasemian (2012) was used to investigate the cultural perception of them. For each question, two of the choices were based on Western cultural issues and two of them were based on the Iranian cultural points. After analyzing the data and calculating the frequencies of four-choice questions, the findings showed that the frequencies of the answers with the Western views were more prevalent in the answers of the first group and the answers of their parents were mostly based on the Iranian views.