Demystifying the cultural representations in international high school English textbooks: a social-semiotic approach and teachers’ views

ABSTRACT

Albeit cultural content in English textbooks have been much reported, little empirical evidence addresses global or international-distributed English textbooks. To fill this void, the present qualitative content analysis study aims to explore the representation of cultural content in international English textbooks used for Indonesian senior high school students. For another contribution, we also attempt to gain English teachers’ perceptions of cultural content in the textbooks examined through written interviews. Grounded in a social semiotic approach, the findings showcased that the textbooks’ content represents inner-circle countries in the aspect of perspectives, products, persons, and practices. Further, the imbalance in the cultural representation of the outer circle and expanding circle countries indicated that the authors do not sufficiently increase the global cultural awareness of English language learners because other cultural perspectives on varieties of English are not included. The interviews analysis revealed that the cultural contents were short and required improvement.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural representation
• English textbook
• qualitative content analysis
• social semiotic
• intercultural communicative competence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fadhila Yonata

Fadhila Yonata is a lecturer at Sekolah Tinggi Agama Islam Negeri Sultan Abdurrahman Kepulauan Riau, Indonesia. His research interests are teaching English as a foreign language, textbook evaluation and discourse studies.

Anna Riana Suryanti Tambunan

Anna Riana Suryanti Tambunan serves as a lecturer at Universitas Negeri Medan. She obtained her doctoral degree (Doctor in English Education) from Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia based in West Java, Indonesia. Her research interests are teaching English as a foreign language, online feedback on writing, textbook analysis, and intercultural communication.

Fauziah Khairani Lubis

Fauziah Khairani Lubis is a lecturer at Universitas Negeri Medan, Indonesia, from 2008. She acquired a doctorate in Linguistics which focuses on Literature in 2016. She loves writing and has published 3 poem books and 1 novel. She is also interested in research on language and has also published her research papers in international journals.

Euis Rina Mulyani

Euis Rina Mulyani teaches at Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan (IKIP) Siliwangi. She has graduated from Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, located in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. She is interested in researching topics relating to teaching and learning English and applied linguistics.

Suwarno Suwarno

Suwarno is a lecturer at Politeknik Negeri Batam, Indonesia. His research interests include English for vocational purposes, critical discourse studies, systemic functional linguistics in language education, corpus linguistics, narrative inquiry, and sociocultural studies.