Investigation of cultural elements in secondary English course books

Language and culture are inseparable from each other. Therefore, the inclusion of cultural elements in the language teaching materials is important. English is the most common foreign language that is taught in Turkey. However, the insufficiency of teaching English in Turkey has been voiced by people from all walks of life. Every step that may contribute the quality of English teaching in Turkey is essential. It is important that the materials used for language teaching should include the cultural elements for both teaching the language effectively and to develop the communication abilities of the learners. So far, many studies have been conducted to determine whether the books used for English language teaching include cultural elements. However, it is important to demonstrate how recent course books deals with the issue and how they develop in order to guide the development of future English course books. The purpose of this stusy is to investigate cultural elements in terms of source, target and international cultural elements in 4 English course books (5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders) approved by the Board of Education and Discipline of Ministry of Education of Turkey for use for 5 years starting from the 2014-2015 academic year. The study adopted the mixed method design. The quantitative distribution of cultural elements in the books represents the quantitative data and the content analysis on this data represents the qualitative data of the study. Results indicate that all four books consist of cultural elements and target culture elements are dominant which is contradictory with the findings of most of the earlier studies. On the other hand, the books in question do not adopt a comparative and an in-depth approach contributing to the increase in the cultural awareness of the learners. In the conclusion section of the study, suggestions were put forward to eliminate the flaws identified as a result of the content analysis.