The representation of culture in EFL learners’ available lexicon

Abstract

This study explores the words that 265 pre-university (12th grade) English as a foreign language learners produce in response to the prompt ‘Food and drink’. Specifically, it aims to (i) ascertain the number of cultural words this sample of learners retrieved overall and in their first responses to the abovementioned word stimulus; (ii) classify the culture these terms represent, i.e., source, target and international, and (iii) account for sex-based differences in cultural word elicitation. Our findings evince that the number of cultural tokens corresponded to one fourth of the total number of the words students retrieved in response to the aforementioned prompt. These tokens mostly belonged to international culture. As for sex-based differences, our data revealed that males obtained higher mean values and retrieved a higher rate of cultural types in their first responses than females did. However, differences between male and female learners in regard with cultural word elicitation were not statistically significant.