Cultural categories in three mainstream EFL textbooks in Iran: A case study of Top Notch, American English Files, and Four Corners

Abstract

Cultural content and developing learners’ intercultural competence has become an important issue after the advent of intercultural communicative approach (ICC) in language teaching field. Therefore, the cultural content of EFL textbooks as learners’ main source for language learning is an important issue for investigation. The current study analyzed cultural content of three mainstream intermediate level EFL textbooks, namely Top Notch (volume 2), American English Files (volume 3) and Four Corners (Volume 2). This study analyzed the cultural categories which included target culture, source culture and international culture based on Coratzzi and Jin’s (1999) categorization as well as the category introduced by Aliakbari (2004), culture free to complement these three. This was a quantitative study. The quantitative data focused on an account of the amount (percentage and frequency) of the cultural content treatment in the textbooks. To find out if the difference between cultural categories was statistically significant or not, chi-square test was applied. The result of the study showed statistically no significant difference among the three books in terms of their cultural categories.