Designing Culture-oriented Materials for Iranian EAP University Students: The Relative Impacts on Receptive and Productive Tasks Performance

Although culture-oriented contents can be regarded as determining factors in the performance of EAP university students' receptive and productive tasks, a paucity of investigation on the impacts of culture-oriented materials on their receptive and productive tasks performance is strongly felt. To partly fill this gap, a culture-oriented English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) course book was developed based on Tomlinson's (2001) materials development framework. A total of 180 participants were selected according to their language proficiency results, and were stratified into four receptive and productive EGAP task groups encompassing Lecture Presentation, Note-taking, Academic Writing, and Figure Drawing. Then, the developed course book was taught and practiced in each of the EGAP classes, and the treatments pertaining to each EGAP task were implemented separately in each group. Having passed twenty treatment sessions, the participants were administered a posttest including the main four skills. Then, through a modified version of Mukundan, Hajimohammadi, and Nimehchisalem's (2011) course book evaluation checklist, the students were shown to have positive attitudes towards the culture-oriented content. Furthermore, a one-way ANOVA test was used for analyzing task performance and indicated that culture-oriented content had a significant impact on the Iranian EAP university students' task performance. Similarly, a paired samples t-test revealed that culture-oriented content affected the EAP students' Lecture Presentation, Note-taking, Academic Writing, and Figure Drawing separately. It was further observed that Lecture Presentation as a productive task for enhancing the speaking skill was highly influenced by culture-oriented content in the EGAP classrooms. The findings suggest that the significance of the first culture as the determining yardstick for incorporating materials attributed to the second culture in EAP language teaching arenas should be taken into consideration. This can materialize by conducting receptive and productive EGAP tasks in general, and lecture presentation in particular.