THE CULTURAL CONTENT OF GLOBALLY-DESIGNED ENGLISH COURSE BOOKS AND THEIR IMPLICATION IN ELT

Over recent years, there has been much interest in the role of culture in foreign language teaching. Language and culture are interconnected, and the teaching of the former in the foreign situation requires the teacher to be sensitive to the latter. Hence, EFL teachers need to be careful in deciding the selection of cultural content for ELT classrooms. Most of the cultural information is retrieved in course books that are designed for a specific language. Course books may directly or indirectly communicate sets of cultural values. In this paper, an assessment of a globally-designed course book (Headway) for elementary English learners will be explored in terms of the way in which the target culture has been described, considering the appropriacy of the cultural and the socio-political content to the real situation in Indonesia. The basic framework of this analysis is adopted from the model comprising a series of categories, which was elaborated by Risager (1991). The implications for the decisions about the culture as content in foreign language pedagogy will be discussed from the perspective of the appropriacy in Indonesian context. Keywords: culture, cultural content, course book, language teachin