Exploring English-Majored Students’ Understanding of Western Cultural Features through the Selected Works in the Literary Criticism Course at Can Tho University

Abstract

"Fostering intercultural understanding and intercultural communicative competence in tertiary students has become a decisive strategy for creating a workforce generation that can shape the world’s sustainable development through successful collaborations in global integration contexts. FL literature has been regarded as an effective transportation that delivers cultural knowledge and enhances intercultural communicative competence for students. Thus, this study investigated the understanding of Western cultural features among English-majored students at Can Tho University upon the Literary Criticism course completion. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the research evaluated the ability to recognize Western cultural features in three selected literary works of 90 English-majored students (High-quality program) through a quantitative questionnaire and examined how they interpreted these cultural features and employed strategies to develop intercultural communicative competence through 8 semi-structured interviews. The quantitative analysis demonstrated that a majority of participants could realize prominent Western cultural features after the course, indicating the long-lasting cultural knowledge acquisition through literature. Simultaneously, students’ diverse and profound reflections presented in interviews revealed that Western literature transcends mere linguistic proficiency improvement, but a critical tool for strengthening students’ intercultural understanding, especially Western culture and ICC. This study has underscored the innovative pedagogical practices to provide students with contemporary cultural knowledge vital to effectively and appropriately communicate across cultures and nations in an increasingly globalized setting."