Inter-American cultural relations in foreign language textbooks: The cases of English and French

Abstract

This paper analyses the presence of interamerican cultural relations in reading and listening text obtained from a sample of international English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks and from a sample of international French as a foreign language (FFL) textbooks which are available on American markets. It does so by looking into the frequencies of the texts that contain any of three types of interamerican cultural relations per country, by identifying the pairs that compose each type of relation, by comparing the frequencies of the texts that reflect cultural relations of American countries with American places and with non-American ones and by searching for the instances in which the English language and the French language are instruments that contribute to developing interamerican cultural relations themselves and in connection with the rest of the world. This research arrives at very similar conclusions concerning the data collected from either textbook sample and argues for the need to analyse the amount and types of interamerican cultural content in international EFL and FFL textbooks when choosing to use these textbooks in EFL and FFL programmes for American learners in the American continent and set in American contexts.