كليدواژه :
EFL Reading Comprehension , Cultural Consciousness , Raising , Multicultural Personal Traits
چكيده فارسي :
The importance of personality in EFL learning and teaching is being increasingly recognized by educators and state policy makers alike. Investment and personality development in SL learning is gaining momentum (Norton, 2000, Norton and Toohey, 2002; Kramsch, 2005; Norton, 2010). Therefore, both pedagogical and political aspects of identity require to be investigated to facilitate learning process and help ease the concerns of the state policy makers. In this paper, it has been tried to determine the impact of Reading Comprehension classes with consciousness-raising orientation on Multicultural Personality Traits’ development in EFL students compared with EFL students undergoing regular Reading Comprehension classes with no specific treatments. In order to resolve the issue, 83 EFL students in five RC classes were randomly selected. Two classes, one at Allameh Tabataba’i with 24 students and one at School of International Relations with 12 students, were treated as the experimental group and three classes were set to be the control group for one semester. In the end, Multicultural Personality Traits Questioner, a personality assessment questionnaire developed by Van Der Zee and Oudenhoven (2000) at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands was administered to both CG and EG to measure their five personality features, recognized as Multicultural Personality Traits which are Cultural Empathy, Open-mindedness, Social Initiative, Emotional Stability, and Flexibility. The data collected were analyzed through a t-test comparison of means and it was found that there was not a statistically significant increase in total Multicultural Personality Traits from t1 (M=268.03, SD=12.636) to t2 [M=271.14, SD=11.565, t (34) = 1.588, p≤.05]. But there was a statistically significant value found in the scores of Cultural Empathy (CE) from t1 (M=55.20, SD= 2.67) to t2 [M= 56.49, SD = 2.79, t (34) =2.35; p≤.05].
