Evaluation of a local EFL coursebook in terms of intercultural communicative competence components

The purpose of the current study is to evaluate a local EFL coursebook "Relearn" used for 9th graders in public high schools in Turkey in terms of the intercultural communicative competence components. The book was constructed within the standards of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and was developed in conformity with the national ELT curriculum by Turkish Ministry of National Education. The coursebook was content analyzed via a checklist created on the basis of Byram's Intercultural Communicative Competence Model (1997). The findings revealed that the majority of the coursebook's content was culture-free, and there were limited number of intercultural activities. The activities mostly belong to "knowledge" dimension of Byram's framework. This study is believed to shed light on the significance of developing intercultural communicative competence and provide useful insights for EFL teachers, EFL teacher educators, coursebook writers and curriculum developers. Keywords: English Language Teaching, Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), Materials Evaluation, Culture and Language Teaching