Cultural issues in algerian EFL materials : an evaluation of the algerian secondry school 3rd year textbook
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Date
2015
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university of Oum-El-Bouaghi
Abstract
This work is concerned with the evaluation of the algerian secondary school third year textbookfor english," new prospects", which was introduced by the Ministry of education under the general educational reform in 2007. The study focused on the book's cultural contextualisation on both the linguistic level (texts) and the visual level (images), which is very important in developing pupils' intercultural competence. More particularly, the study investigated which of
the target language cultures are portrayed in the textbook and how the suggested activities contribute to raising the learners' awareness of culture. In addition to that, an attempt is made to investigate the teachers' perspective on the cultural content of the textbook. The evaluation is based on an adapted evaluation model Yassine (2008) that tackles the major facets of culture, inaddition to a questionnaire addressed to secondary school teachers who are currently using the
textbook. The results obtained reveal that 'New Prospects' favours the british and americanmainstream culture as the main context for teaching english, as opposed to other Englishspeaking cultures, with focus on the national culture. Although the textbook mostly presentsculture as facts, the attempt to provide intercultural learning is sometimes encompassed by the
activities but not to the point that makes students think critically.
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Keywords
Teaching : english language : textbook : (Algeria)