The representation of cultural elements in ELT coursebooks at secondary schools in Turkey: A comparative study

The integration of culture into coursebooks used for teaching English as a second/foreign language has attracted much attention recently as a result of changes in the status of English as a lingua franca or an international language. This study aims to investigate two main issues in coursebooks used in Turkish Secondary Schools. A 6th grade English coursebook published by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE) and a 6th grade commercial coursebook were compared, firstly, in terms of cultural elements: source culture, target culture and international culture, and secondly, in terms of four cultural aspects: products, practices, perspectives and persons. In order to analyze the coursebooks, document analysis and also semi-structured interview were used. A qualitative analysis of the cultural elements demonstrated that the commercial coursebook has more cultural items than the MoNE-published coursebook. While the main emphasis is on source and intercultural cultures in the MoNE-published coursebook, it is on target and international cultures in the commercial coursebook. However, in both coursebooks, the source, the target and the international cultural elements are not distributed in an equal proportion. The findings also pointed out that in both coursebooks, the most frequently represented cultural element is products, and that in the commercial coursebook the persons element is represented differently from the MoNE-published coursebook.