A diachronic analysis of the cultural aspect of local English coursebooks

Delving into a wide range of the cultural elements, the current study endeavoured to reveal the tortuous path the secondary school English coursebooks have passed in Iran. To this end, the secondary school coursebooks of level one were diachronically investigated for the commonly unnoticed side of culture, ie the perspective aspect of culture, names, and images. In so doing, the above‐mentioned elements of culture in the coursebooks from 1939, when the very first English coursebook was introduced to the country, till the latest series published in 2016 were scrutinised. The results suggested that not only have cultural elements lacked a coherent framework to be translated into English coursebooks, but they have also been an uncharted island on the English coursebook authors’ map. Additionally, the researchers suggest that the haphazard representation of culture might be partly due to the fact that a viable definition of culture, at least in the realm of applied linguistics, does not exist and some studies may need to be carried out on this issue

A Visual Analysis of English Language Textbooks: Celebrities’ Role as Cultural Figures

This paper seeks to probe cultural agendas pertaining to the images of celebrities in the widely-used English language textbooks. In fact, while visual analysis has solidified its position in ELT (e.g. Hurst, 2014; Mitsikopoulou, 2015; Romney, 2012; Taylor-Mendes, 2009) and caused the pendulum to swing away from the grammatical or textual content to the visual presentation (Giaschi, 2000), research into celebrities as the cultural representatives has been a barely touched issue. To address this gap, the researchers, drawing on Kachru’s (1985) orthodox model of the usage of English across the globe, examined the images of celebrities in four widely-used English language textbook series. In so doing, the terms depiction and mention (Toprak & Aksoyalp, 2014) were taken as a yardstick to pinpoint the type of intersection between the text and the image.  Further, the images were thematically explored, which notably indicated the images relating to the field of media were the far most common theme in the English language textbooks. Lastly, it was revealed that whereas the images of the inner-circle outnumbered all, the images of the expanding circle surprisingly outnumbered those of the outer circle, an outcome which could point to linguistic schizophrenia (Kachru, 1992) as the main reason

EFL teachers’ role in English: Letting the silent majority voice their words

With the advent of the global perspective on English, the live issues of the ownership and culture of English (Akbari, 2008; Seidlhofer, 2005) have begun to shake up numerous conventional notions of the field. In the wake of this landmark shift, this study attempts to probe EFL teachers’ cultural attitude toward prospective English words. To this end, identifying twelve highly Persian culture-specific words, the researchers devised an attitude questionnaire, which was administered to 351 EFL teachers to examine their right of cultural encoding (Kirkpatrick, 2014) as English users. The study concludes with granting a legitimate norm-overriding role to EFL teachers in order to gate-keep their required concepts in English

EFL teachers’ role in English: Letting the silent majority voice their words

With the advent of the global perspective on English, the live issues of the ownership and culture of English (Akbari, 2008; Seidlhofer, 2005) have begun to shake up numerous conventional notions of the field. In the wake of this landmark shift, this study attempts to probe EFL teachers’ cultural attitude toward prospective English words. To this end, identifying twelve highly Persian culture-specific words, the researchers devised an attitude questionnaire, which was administered to 351 EFL teachers to examine their right of cultural encoding (Kirkpatrick, 2014) as English users. The study concludes with granting a legitimate norm-overriding role to EFL teachers in order to gate-keep their required concepts in English

EFL teachers’ role in English: Letting the silent majority voice their words

With the advent of the global perspective on English, the live issues of the ownership and culture of English (Akbari, 2008; Seidlhofer, 2005) have begun to shake up numerous conventional notions of the field. In the wake of this landmark shift, this study attempts to probe EFL teachers’ cultural attitude toward prospective English words. To this end, identifying twelve highly Persian culture-specific words, the researchers devised an attitude questionnaire, which was administered to 351 EFL teachers to examine their right of cultural encoding (Kirkpatrick, 2014) as English users. The study concludes with granting a legitimate norm-overriding role to EFL teachers in order to gate-keep their required concepts in English