Cultural elements and their categories in EFL textbooks

Abstract

It has long been assumed that language and culture are interrelated: language echoes cultural values, norms of behaviour, attitudes and many other features of a particular sociocultural community. An important aspect of learning/ teaching a language is learning/ teaching its culture. The main goal of current foreign language (FL) education is to develop students into interculturally competent citizens and make them aware of various differences which lie between their native culture and the target one. As textbooks incorporate the cultural information, special attention should be paid to their cultural content. Cultural content can be reflected through textual material, exercises, illustrations which should aim at fostering knowledge of essential elements of FL culture and bring to their comparison with the essential elements of the native culture. This article compares the cultural contents of four English as a foreign language (EFL) textbook in terms of their inclusion of various categories of cultural elements. The purpose of the study is to identify what categories of cultural elements prevail in the EFL textbooks under analysis, which might influence, to a greater extent, language students’ understanding of the culture being studied. Content analysis method has been used to determine data. The obtained results suggest that in all the four EFL textbooks elements describing material (surface) culture prevail, leaving aside elements pertaining to the ‘axiological’ (deep) culture which deals with values, norms, and attitudes.