An investigation of cultural awareness of Ubon Ratchathani techinical college students at a diploma level

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether or not the UTC students at a diploma level had an awareness of the target language culture; especially, The English and American culture.
The subjects of this study was to investigate whether or not the UTC students at a diploma level had an awareness of the target language culture; especially, The English and American culture.
The subjects of this study were 40 diploma students at Ubon Ratchathanee Technical College which were selected from all the first year diploma level who studied in the second semester, academic year 2008. They were also selected by their grade point average from 1-4 in the previous English course. Ten subjects were selected from each grade point average. They were required to take a true/false test focusing on an understanding of cultural contents presented in their textbook used in the “Developing Skills for Communication 1” course. Then the scores obtained were converted into percentages.
Results gained from the study revealed that most UTC students at a diploma level were likely to lack cultural awareness of the English target language. This tendency may be explained in relation to the lack of cultural resources such as the limited cultural information in a classroom textbook, which makes it difficult for both learners and teachers to become aware of the cultural norm of the target language.