چكيده فارسي :
The main goal of learning a language is to be able to communicate in the language. In order to be communicatively effective, linguistic competence should be accompanied with pragmatic and cultural competence. Intercultural competence (IC) is a must for today’s learners of English as an international language (EIL). EFL materials should provide learners with enough cultural, as well as linguistic, knowledge. Any culture propagates certain values and ideologies and the way culture is represented in EFL materials is worthy of attention. Cultural themes can be divided into big “C” and little “c” culture in terms of their scope. The cultural source is another important issue, which can be about the target, the source, or the international target culture. Several studies so far have analyzed the cultural content of EFL textbooks and other materials. However, there exist a number of authentic materials beside classroom materials, such as the media, which are popular among EFL learners. This study aims to analyze the cultural content of the VOA news, the Special English version. The targeted audience is millions of EFL learners around the world. It would be interesting to know how EFL learners are exposed to cultural information through listening to the VOA news and whether they are provided with sufficient cultural competence necessary for effective communication or not. In the study, 240 pieces of news from four successive months were analyzed from two perspectives, the news cultural source and their cultural themes in terms of big “C” and little “c” culture. The corpus-based analysis of the news revealed that the main source of cultural content of the VOA news was the international target culture as far as the international audience was the target. As for the second perspective, the main themes of the news were all big “C” culture, with ‘politics’ as the most dominant theme. Little “c” cultural themes, such as attitudes, beliefs and preferences, which are an integral part of IC, were rarely observed. The findings suggest that listening to the VOA news, as a source of language/culture learning, is not enough to equip EFL learners with IC needed for international communication. Language learners should benefit from different learning sources in order to be effective language users.
