Investigating Cultural components in the Algerian English Textbook

Abstract

The current research sheds light on analyzing the content of the Algerian secondary school third year textbook “New Prospects”. It aims at investigating the cultural components of the textbook in order to examine whether learners are exposed to the target culture and the mother culture. Moreover, the study attempts to analyze the way culture is presented within the content of “New Prospects”, the way it is classified, and more precisely whether this textbook helps learners to raise awareness about their own culture and the target culture. It also seeks to investigate if the content is enough to develop learners’ intercultural competence toward learning the foreign culture and toward people of the target culture, in a way that would make them promote positive attitudes like acceptance, appreciation empathy, and adaptability, in this context a textbook evaluation is made in order to find answers to the research questions. The findings reveal that “New Prospects” does contain the cultural knowledge within its content, and learners are presented with the target and the foreign culture but in a superficial way. Hence, “New Prospects” still lacks more aspects of culture like values, beliefs and religion etc. Therefore, intercultural communicative competence would not be achieved through the use of this textbook.