Intercultural exposure in English in Mind Students Book 3

Teaching culture and developing intercultural awareness in English language teaching have become the main concern for language professionals and teachers since English serves as Lingua Franca in many parts of the world. Therefore, learning through cultural presentation in English coursebook is one important issue to be investigated. This present study analyzes the presentation of culture and types of cultural exposure in a coursebook entitled English in Mind Students Book 3. The content analysis is based on the theory of Adaskou, et all (1990); Cortazzi & Jin (1999) and Xiao’s (2010), all of which posit that culture learning/teaching and the themes to accomplish this are important for contemporary ELT culture acquisition. The study finds that coursebook portrays culture mainly in the form of visual illustration. Subsequently, the source culture, the target culture and the international culture are found in unbalanced proportion where the target culture references are more dominant than the source culture and the international culture. There was a strong sense of a hierarchical representation of the inner circle world in which the British and the US cultures served as the supreme source. Investigating the result of cultural domain, small “c’ culture is highlighted over big ”C” culture. However, sixteen themes under big ”C” and small “c” are focused on the target culture. Cultural value and life style are the most frequent themes which appear in the coursebook. Keywords: cultural exposure, target culture, source culture, international culture, big “C” target-culture learning, small “c” target culture learning, intercultural awareness