Cultural barriers on English language teaching and learning in EFL context

This paper investigates some crucial cultural factors which hinder learning process and identifies the impacts of cultural barriers on English language teaching and learning. The study is organized on the basis of investigating the effect of the usage of social factors, religious matters, and taboo words as cultural dimension and analyzing the questionnaires which are based on Likert scale in 18 questions with the participations of 40 males and 40 females of Cambridge English Institutes students to diagnose the cultural elements which might hinder the learning process in Sari city, Iran. The questionnaires include five main domains as follows: i. the usage of both Iranian and English cultural based factors; ii. learners' faithfulness to Iranianculture as a criterion in avoiding cultures' devastations by focusing on English culture; iii. religious and politicalbeliefs; iv. the effect of globalization on English language learning; and v. avoiding strategies in using topicsregarding taboo vocabulary as cultural barriers. The analysis describes the relationships between the items in the survey. The effect of eachdomain is calculated on the basis of five domains, the findings demonstrates that English learning may be more effectively processed for Iranian students if both Iranian and English culture are going to be used (44.7 partially agree). It also shows that barriers like taboo words (30.62 neither agree nor disagree), political relations (31.3 partially agree) and religious factors (34.8 disagreed) are partially effective on ELT