Abstract
The present study focuses on the critical evaluation of the cultural content incorporated in the 5th and 6th grade English textbooks, which are taught in the Greek state primary school. Given that we are living in the era of increasing globalization, it is deemed essential that aspects of diverse cultures should be reflected in the English textbooks, thus enabling contemporary EFL learners to master the ability to use the English language efficiently in their intercultural interactions regardless of their socio-cultural background. The research findings succinctly reveal that the vast majority of state EFL teachers in Greece are fervent proponents of an intercultural approach in their teaching practices. However, they are not reliant on the prescribed textbooks under scrutiny for promoting the intercultural dimension in their educational methodology, since their cultural input is assessed as deficient and inadequate for dynamic intercultural instruction.
Highlights
It is an established reality that the modern world is regarded as a ‘global village’ (Kramsch, 1987) composed of increasingly heterogeneous societies with members featuring diverse cultural attributes, lifestyles, beliefs, values, attitudes and behavioral conventions
The present study focuses on the critical evaluation of the cultural content incorporated in the 5th and 6th grade English textbooks, which are taught in the Greek state primary school
C1 and C3 are more frequently observed in B1 than in B2, whereas C2 and Free/Neutral culture are more common in B2
Summary
It is an established reality that the modern world is regarded as a ‘global village’ (Kramsch, 1987) composed of increasingly heterogeneous societies with members featuring diverse cultural attributes, lifestyles, beliefs, values, attitudes and behavioral conventions. The last two versions of the Greek National EFL Curriculum, namely the CTCF (Note 1) (2003−2015) and the IFLC (Note 2) (2016), ratify an intercultural outlook in ELT (Anastasiadou, 2015) and they emphatically stress the significance of raising the young learners’ awareness of cultural and linguistic pluralism. In this sense, they both advocate a transnational perspective that breeds a spirit of embracement of multicultural identity and promotes global citizenship (Karras, 2021; Penderi, 2018)
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