The relationships between motivation, achievement, cultural competence and speaking proficiency to the methods used by high school Spanish foreign language teachers to teach culture

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between the approaches, methods, or techniques used by Spanish foreign language teachers to teach culture, and the level of motivation, achievement, cultural competence, and speaking proficiency of Spanish foreign language students. It is assumed that many current Spanish foreign language teachers have learned that the communicative approach within the teaching of culture is the most effective, but yet this approach is not been regularly taught. However, Spanish foreign language students' motivation, achievement, cultural competence, and speaking proficiency have being affected. Descriptive statistics and inferential analyses of the data collected from an instrument survey completed by 81 former Spanish high school students provided the statistical results of this study. Descriptive statistical procedures were used to summarize, organize, and simplify the information collected from the survey, and inferential statistics, on the other hand, were used to make inferences or predictions about the similarity of the samples to the populations from which the samples were drawn.;In order to investigate the relationship between the approaches, methods or techniques Spanish foreign language teachers use to teach culture, and the motivation, achievement, cultural competence, and speaking proficiency of Spanish foreign language students; a survey was given to Spanish Intermediate students at a large size urban university in southeast Michigan.;Chi square analyses were performed on 4 null hypotheses, which resulted in non significant difference for all. In addition, null hypotheses were performed to see if associations could be found between the respondent's characteristics and the initial survey answers in the questionnaire. These analyses resulted in 3 statistically significant differences. Descriptive statistical procedures, such as frequency tables and bar charts, were developed in order to provide the reader with a clear and distinct picture of the data for interpretation.;The data collected in this study suggested that the Small Culture Teaching Method is the most frequently used by Spanish foreign language teachers. In addition, these results suggested that motivation, achievement, cultural competence, and speaking proficiency of Spanish foreign language students have no statistically significant relationship with the approach, method, or technique used by their high school teacher to teach culture to their Spanish classes.