The development of culture in English foreign language textbooks: the case of English File

The cultural content of textbooks has become an important issue since the main goal of teaching English as a foreign language has shifted from communicative competence to intercultural citizenship. This paper reviews the trends in teaching culture in EFL and examines different approaches to the cultural analysis of textbooks. Then, our study analyses the cultural content of two editions of an intermediate (B1) EFL textbook using our own cultural content checklist. By comparing older and more recent editions, we examine how comprehensive the cultural content is in each book and determine how many thematic categories are covered in both textbooks.