A Comparative Analysis of the Cultural Contents and Elements in International and Localized ELT Textbooks

Considering the significant role of textbooks as culture carriers and the role that culture plays in the process of language learning, this study aimed at the cultural analysis of two widely used textbook series in the Iranian context. To this end, the Touchstone and Iran Language Institute (ILI) series were analyzed and compared for cultural content adopting Cortazzi and Jins’s (1999) and Tajeddin and Teimournezhad’s (2014) frameworks. The cultural elements of the series were also investigated utilizing Adaskou et al.’s (1990) model. In terms of cultural contents, ILI represented all four types of cultural contents, though not with equal weight; whereas, in the Touchstone series, the target culture followed by international themes had more weight, and the source culture had almost gone unnoticed. As for cultural elements, while both aesthetic and sociological senses of culture were highly dominant in both series, pragmatic and semantic senses were not in the spotlight. Furthermore, Chisquare tests indicated significant differences between these two series in terms of both cultural content and element representations.