The intercultural component in EFL coursebooks

The word culture in Chinese used to refer to 'a situation wherein a change takes place for one side or both sides concerned, as a result of their contact with each other' (Fang 2019 in Dervin amp; Yuan 2022:3). The central idea of this conception seems to remain in the conceptualization of intercultural communicative competence, which implies the interest of knowing and learning about other cultural referents, the reflection upon identity and the desire to rebuild our own identity from an intercultural experience (Níkleva 2009). But, how is the intercultural component developed in EFL books? We looked at four books used in the teaching of English as a foreign language with the aim of examining how intercultural issues are approached in beginner level textbooks. A careful qualitative analysis including information extracted from the students' and the teachers' books was carried out. Attention was paid to the activities presented and to the visual support that accompanies each edition, with the goal of finding out which cultures are made visible. Finally, the focus was placed on the representation of these cultures in the recordings offered by the coursebooks. With the exception of a strong presence on the visual support, the results showed that the representation of the plural reality in the textbooks under study is still scarce and that the treatment of the cultural diversity is, in general, quite superficial.Fil: Grasso, Marina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (UNLP-CONICET); Argentina