Cultural perspectives of Turkish ELT coursebooks: Do standardized teaching texts incorporate intercultural features?

Abstract

The integration of language and culture has been one of the focal concerns of language pedagogy. This integration has become progressively more important with the increasing role of English as a global lingua franca. Therefore, it is important for language teaching materials to present various cultural elements in order to pave the way for the development of Intercultural Communicative Competence. Until now, it has been claimed that most of the government-issued coursebooks used in language classes in Turkey fail to create a meaningful relationship between home and target cultures, thereby overlooking the importance of cultural diversity. The present study is an attempt to explore whether this kind of limited cultural content persists in language teaching materials. Accordingly, a series of three coursebooks used as core language teaching texts at public elementary schools in Turkey was evaluated in terms of four cultural aspects: products, practices, perspectives, and people. It was found that contrary to the previous studies, all three of the coursebooks do take diverse cultures into account, although with a clear emphasis on Europe.