Demystifying Cultural Contents in EFL Textbooks: A Comparative Analysis of Inner and Expanding Circle Countries Series

Abstract

The third millennium brought with itself the concept of cultural mosaic. Textbooks play crucial roles in representing this diversity in teaching various cultures to present regions, behaviors, conventions, religions, and values of different societies around the globe. In recent decades, cultural content analysis of EFL textbooks has become an important issue in ELT education to account for globalization and intercultural communication, especially in inner- and expanding-circle countries. This study aimed to probe into the extent English textbooks demonstrate cultural themes by comparing the written texts of two textbooks, Vision and Touchstone, taught in high school and language institutes for adult students from pre- to upper-intermediate levels. Having adopted Xiao’s (2010) checklist, this cultural theme analysis extracted and compared the big ‘C’ and small ‘c’ themes in these six books using the Chi-Square statistical analysis. The findings showed an imbalanced occurrence of themes in both textbooks with slightly more occurrences of Big ‘c’ cultural themes than small “c” in both textbooks. Touchstone has more frequent Big “C” and Small “c” themes than the Vision series. The most frequent Big C culture topics were geography, social norms, and education and the most prominent small ‘c’ culture topics included lifestyle, everyday living relations, and values/beliefs respectively. This study enlightens the organization of cultural contents presented in common English coursebooks to help expedite learning culture as a constituent of intercultural communicative competence and to equip students of English as a foreign language, as intercultural citizens, for the international communication ecosystem.