A comperative analysis of English as a foreign language teaching coursebooks used by Turkish, Austrian and Afgan secondary schools

The aim of this study is to reveal the similarities and differences of the educational and cultural contents of English coursebooks used in foreign language teaching in three countries with different profiles (Turkey, Austria and Afghanistan), and in this context, to make suggestions that can contribute to publishing houses, institutions responsible for evaluating coursebooks and teachers. In the study, content analysis was made on the coursebooks by using the qualitative research method, and the findings were presented comparatively. The study group of the research consists of English coursebooks approved by the relevant ministry, which are taught in the first year of secondary education between the years 2019-2020 in countries where English is taught as a foreign language. One of the three coursebooks included in the study is Teenwise 9 from Turkey, where the study was conducted, the second is Englisch BHS 1: Start Up from Austria, and the third is English for Afghanistan 10 from Afghanistan. These selected coursebooks are; The characteristics of the people and characters they contain were analyzed in terms of their implicit messages, cultural elements, basic language skills, language sub-skills and self-assessment activities. The findings reveal that the three coursebooks have similar but also different aspects. The people and the characters included in the coursebooks show different distributions and features according to their gender, occupational group, age period, and their being real or fictional. While implicit messages are included in all of them, the content of these messages varies. Local, target and foreign cultures are transferred in all of the books but the type of culture that stands out in each book is different. In addition, only one of the three coursebooks includes teaching all language skills. In the coursebooks, teaching language skills takes place with similar content but with different approaches. The books also differ in terms of their inclusion of self-assessment activities and the structure of them. In line with the results; a fair attitude towards the representation of male and female characters in the coursebooks, giving more space to the presentation of the adolescent characters that constitute the target audience, covering universally accepted values as well as current issues such as health and migration, having a multicultural portfolio in the creation of cultural content, including activities to improve listening and pronunciation knowledge in skill activities, and finally presenting self-assessment activities that will enable the development of the student's metacognitive thinking skills are recommended.