Critical Cultural Awareness (CCA) in the EFL Classroom: A Study of Turkish Teachers' Perspectives

This study investigates Turkish EFL teachers’ perspectives on Critical Cultural Awareness (CCA), a key component of Byram’s Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) model that involves the critical evaluation of cultural perspectives, practices, and products. Specifically, the study explores teachers’ conceptualizations of CCA, their perceptions of its integration into English Language Teaching (ELT) programs, its representation in ELT textbooks and materials, and strategies for fostering CCA in language education. Employing an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, quantitative data were first collected through the Critical Cultural Awareness Questionnaire (CCAQ), administered online to 120 participants using snowball sampling. Subsequently, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 volunteer participants selected from the survey respondents to provide deeper insight into the quantitative findings. The findings indicate that teachers strongly support cultural diversity, cultural equality, and the inclusion of learners’ local cultural identities in ELT. However, their understandings of CCA tend to emphasize intercultural comparison, cultural understanding, and mutual respect rather than the critical examination of representation, power relations, ideology, and inequality that characterize Byram’s notion of critical cultural awareness. Participants also perceived a continued dominance of Western and native-speaker cultural perspectives in ELT programs and globally produced materials, while expressing the need for greater inclusion of local cultural content. In addition, teachers identified authentic materials, professional development opportunities, and international projects as important means of promoting CCA. The study suggests that Turkish EFL teachers demonstrate an emerging but uneven development of critical cultural awareness and highlights the need for teacher education programs and curricula that more explicitly address the critical dimensions of culture, including representation, ideology, and power. These findings contribute to ongoing discussions on intercultural language education, teacher cognition, and culturally responsive ELT materials in the Turkish EFL context.