Movie Exploratory Study for Appropriate Cultural Contents for Enhancing Thai EFL Students’ English-Speaking Skills and Intercultural Communicative Competence

Abstract

Currently, English is regarded as the global language used in communication by people in multicultural backgrounds, and language and culture are inseparable.  Therefore, teaching and learning English need to address the cultural knowledge and develops the learners’ skills of intercultural communicative competence through authentic texts.  Movies provide rich cultural content with real language used for communication contexts.  This paper intends to investigate problems and needs of Thai EFL students in developing English speaking skills and intercultural communicative competence (ICC), and to explore appropriate English movies with cultural contents for enhancing students’ English speaking and intercultural communicative competence.  The participants, 65 in total are divided into three group involving experts in movie fields, English teachers, and students in undergraduate level who enrolled for English for Communication.  The research instruments employed in this research consists of the Needs Analysis Survey Questionnaire for Teaching and Learning English and Intercultural and Movie Exploratory Survey Questionnaire.  The results revealed that the students realized the importance of learning English and culture and they indicate that they would feel more confident in communicating in English in reality. However, they lacked opportunity to expose to using English in the real context. The study also found top ten English movies which provide fruitful English language communication and cultural contents in the movie scenes for developing Thai EFL students to learn English speaking and intercultural communicative competence.  EFL teachers, course designers, or language educators can make use of these findings for developing the curricula or revise existing English curricula to suit needs and problems of students and integrating the list of movies with cultural contents for enhancing Thai EFL learners’ communicative competence.