Elnaz Zariholhosseini - Ph. D. Student, Department of Foreign Languages, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran
Azizeh Chalak - Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran

It is considered remarkable that there is a strong link between language and culture and they are intertwined. In this respect, teachers are supposed to teach a foreign culture as well as a foreign language. The central purpose of this study was to compare experienced and novice EFL teachers attitudes and thoughts about cultural aspects of language teaching, their perceptions towards teaching culture to teenagers in educational contexts, and the cultural topics they were eager to teach in foreign language classrooms. Closed questionnaires and semi-structured interview were applied to collect the data. The questionnaires were distributed among 60 English teachers of Gooyesh Language Institute in Isfahan in Iran. In addition, 20 EFL teachers (10 experienced and 10 novice teachers) were asked to answer the questions in the interview. Therefore, frequency, percentage, and Mann-Whitney U test were used to compare and analyze the data. The findings suggested that there were significant differences between the experienced and novice teachers attitudes towards teaching culture to teenagers in only ten cases and the differences in the rest of the cases were not statically significant. Moreover, there were no significant differences between the experienced and novice teachers favorite cultural topics, but the experienced teachers preferred to deal with some cultural topics more in comparison to the novice teachers.

Culture, Educational contexts, Experienced Teachers, Novice Teachers, Perceptions