DEVELOPING THE INVENTORY OF CULTURAL COMPONENTS TO ASSESS PERCEPTION IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

As culture and language learning are regarded as inseparable, language teaching classes are expected to cover some elements of cultural values. The present study aims to deal with the components of culture by explaining the construction of the Inventory of Cultural Components which was developed by the researcher. The initial version of the 5-scale Likert type inventory which constituted of 58 items was administered to a number of 580 participants at the departments of English Language Teaching and Turkish Language Teaching during the spring term of 2011-2012 academic year. Reduction and categorization of the items were provided by factor analysis and reliability of the scale was calculated. The overall results indicated Cronbach’s alpha reliability of .94 for the nine-component 45-itemed scale. Thus, researchers might benefit from the instrument to identify the cultural components being included in language teaching curriculum.