Burning Guys? How Upper-Secondary School English Language Teaching Textbooks Deal with Cultural Learning

Abstract

With a foundation in the course goals for the B Course in English at Upper-Secondary school, this essay will, by way of content and discourse analysis seek to investigate the representation of culture as it pertains to second language textbooks in general distribution. After defining the link between second language learning and cultural knowledge, the essay moves on to examine five different texts from British authors in three different textbooks. An analysis is made the texts themselves and their respective exercises to establish how cultural content is inte- grated and enacted. The study found a number of texts that would represent British culture in narrow terms of culture as great works of art. It found less evidence that textbook publishers seriously engaged with culture-as-behaviour, concluding that textbook writers preferred to universalise the messages and subject matter of the texts - that is texts re- mained merely as vehicles for linguistic comprehension, rather than as sources of cultural knowledge. This has implications for teachers who may not get the help they need from textbooks in the deciphering and formulation of cultural knowledge; it raises questions about how teachers involved in teaching English should be trained and be made aware of the lack of cultural promotion in their resources.